Book shelves series #22, twenty-second Sunday of 2012: Tolkien, Faulkner, McCarthy
As always, sorry for the glare. Shooting this case head on is almost impossible because of the windows on the other side of the room. Anyway.
I’ve read everything by Cormac McCarthy with the exception of his screenplay for The Gardener’s Son, which I found a week or two and picked it up. I don’t own a copy of No Country for Old Men because I haven’t found one that isn’t a movie tie-in.
This copy of The Lord of the Rings—my first—was a kind gift from some friends we were staying with in Melbourne (the one in Australia, not Florida).
I’ve read it at least four times; I have other copies of LoTR and have read them too. It’s probably the book I’ve read the most, although I haven’t read it since 2002. This copy is kindly inscribed:
There’s a slim space on the shelf that currently holds a few books that I’ve been meaning to read:
INTERVIEWER
What about your critics? Can you just sum up briefly what you hold against the French press?
HOUELLEBECQ
First of all, they hate me more than I hate them. What I do reproach them for isn’t bad reviews. It is that they talk about things having nothing to do with my books—my mother or my tax exile—and that they caricature me so that I’ve become a symbol of so many unpleasant things—cynicism, nihilism, misogyny. People have stopped reading my books because they’ve already got their idea about me. To some degree of course, that’s true for everyone. After two or three novels, a writer can’t expect to be read. The critics have made up their minds.
From his Paris Review interview.
A grand duke—“Jimber-jawed Serge.”
Name: Umphadel Piluski
Gangster Salve Spitale—Saliva Spit.
Gooshoofenstein Von Beasinghausen
Meglomania McCarthy
English clubman named Cumbersom
Names Lee Spurgeon, Stoner, Mortimer, Flieshhacker, Henry P. Jacques. Borre.
Bryon Appledeck
Name for movie house “What’s at the Dementia?”
Mr. Schlchgd from Notre Dame in novel.
Beauty boy Johnston
Name Howya Bartlett
Joe Crusoe
Hummer for name
The Marquise de la Close d’Hirondelle
Tookey Ledoux
Harry Fantum
George Gratteciel
Marylyn Miller Swann, Sherlock Holmes Swann
Futility Trust Company
Name of “La Paix” changed to “Thropaca”
Grandfather called Mo’papa
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Notebooks
Read Shannon Mattern’s great essay “Marginalia: Little Libraries in the Urban Margins” (published at Places). From the essay:
These new library projects might seem to emerge from a common culture and uphold a common mission — a flurry of press coverage in late 2011 represented them as a coherent “little library” movement. But in fact they don’t. They have varied aims and politics and assumptions about what a library is and who its publics are; their collections and services differ significantly; and their forms and functions vary from one locality to another. I want to attempt here to identify a loose, and inevitably leaky, typology of “little libraries” — to figure out where they’re coming from, how they relate to existing institutions that perform similar roles, and what impact they’re having on their communities.
Extract, from my typescript descriptive of Finn Mac Cool and his people, being humorous or quasi-humorous incursion into ancient mythology: Of the musics you have ever got, asked Conan, which have you found the sweetest?
I will relate, said Finn. When the seven companies of my warriors are gathered together on the one plain and the truant clean-cold loud-voiced wind goes through them, too sweet to me is that. Echo-blow of a goblet-base against the tables of the palace, sweet to me is that. I like gull-cries and the twittering together of fine cranes. I like the surf-roar at Tralee, the songs of the three sons of Meadhra and the whistle of Mac Lughaidh. These also please me, man-shouts at a parting, cuckoo-call in May. I incline to like pig-grunting in Magh Eithne, the bellowing of the stag of Ceara, the whinging of fauns in Derrynish. The low warble of water-owls in Loch Barra also, sweeter than life that. I am fond of wing-beating in dark belfries, cow-cries in pregnancy, trout-spurt in a laketop. Also the whining of small otters in nettle-beds at evening, the croaking of small-jays behind a wall, these are heart-pleasing. I am friend to the pilibeen, the red-necked chough, the parsnip land-rail, the pilibeen mona, the bottle-tailed tit, the common marsh-coot, the speckle-toed guillemot, the pilibeen sleibhe, the Mohar gannet, the peregrine plough-gull, the long-eared bush-owl, the Wicklow small-fowl, the bevil-beaked chough, the hooded tit, the pilibeen uisce, the common Corby, the fish-tailed mud-piper, the cruiskeen lawn, the carrion sea-cock, the green-lidded parakeet, the brown bog-martin, the maritime wren, the dove-tailed wheatcrake, the beaded daw, the Galway hill-bantam and the pilibeen cathrach. A satisfying ululation is the contending of a river with the sea. Good to hear is the chirping of little red-breasted men in bare winter and distant hounds giving tongue in the secrecy of fog. The lamenting of a wounded otter in a black hole, sweeter than harpstrings that. There is no torture so narrow as to be bound and beset in a dark cavern without food or music, without the bestowing of gold on bards. To be chained by night in a dark pit without company of chessmen – evil destiny! Soothing to my ear is the shout of a hidden blackbird, the squeal of a troubled mare, the complaining of wild-hogs caught in snow.
Relate further for us, said Conan.
It is true that I will not, said Finn.
A lovely early passage from Flann O’Brien’s first novel At Swim-Two-Birds.
Chapter 1.XIV. Upon looking into my mother’s marriage settlement, in order to satisfy myself and reader in a point necessary to be cleared up, before we could proceed any farther in this history;–I had the good fortune to pop upon the very thing I wanted before I had read a day and a half straight forwards,–it might have taken me up a month;–which shews plainly, that when a man sits down to write a history,–tho’ it be but the history of Jack Hickathrift or Tom Thumb, he knows no more than his heels what lets and confounded hindrances he is to meet with in his way,–or what a dance he may be led, by one excursion or another, before all is over. Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule,– straight forward;–for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside, either to the right hand or to the left,- -he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey’s end;–but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly; he will moreover have various Accounts to reconcile: Anecdotes to pick up: Inscriptions to make out: Stories to weave in: Traditions to sift: Personages to call upon: Panegyricks to paste up at this door; Pasquinades at that:–All which both the man and his mule are quite exempt from. To sum up all; there are archives at every stage to be look’d into, and rolls, records, documents, and endless genealogies, which justice ever and anon calls him back to stay the reading of:–In short there is no end of it;–for my own part, I declare I have been at it these six weeks, making all the speed I possibly could,–and am not yet born:–I have just been able, and that’s all, to tell you when it happen’d, but not how;–so that you see the thing is yet far from being accomplished. These unforeseen stoppages, which I own I had no conception of when I first set out;–but which, I am convinced now, will rather increase than diminish as I advance,–have struck out a hint which I am resolved to follow;–and that is,–not to be in a hurry;–but to go on leisurely, writing and publishing two volumes of my life every year;–which, if I am suffered to go on quietly, and can make a tolerable bargain with my bookseller, I shall continue to do as long as I live.
Chapter XIV of the first book of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
Biblioklept 