Tag: birthday

Birthday stacks | Not really a blog about Biblioklept turning nineteen

Biblioklept7 Comments

A few weekends ago we did the take-your-kid-to-college thing, made the ninety-minute SW drive to Gainesville, FL to move our daughter into her first place on her own. She’s living in the same apartment complex her mom lived in, only under a different name. (The apartment complex has a different name. Not my daughter or wife — although I guess my wife has something of a different name, having taken my own last name up as hers.) There was some nostalgia, some weird feelings, etc. But mostly excitement, followed by backache, muscle ache, and an intense week of schlepping even more stuff around my house, cleaning, painting, refinishing, etc. as we repurposed our daughter’s room into an office and my wife’s old office into a studio space for our son.

This process displaced many many books. The house was already littered with stacks, with at least two established semi-permanent piles of incoming volumes and TBRs and etc., but somehow all the furniture relocation led to an entire bookcase heading south and west of Biblioklept World Headquarters. I culled what I could and vowed to get to the rest later. And here we are.

I started this blog on 9 Sept. 2006, nineteen years ago today. I don’t think I would have remembered this connection, even though I’ve blogged about Biblioklept’s birthday several times before, if I hadn’t heard the local sportscaster on his local morning-commute sports show give a shoutout to his wife, whose birthday is today. I thought, Oh, that’s Biblioklept’s birthday too.

(The local sportscaster’s wife is his second wife, or maybe third, I’m not really sure. But he used to be married, way back in the gay nineties, to the news anchor. They were our little big town’s version of a celebrity couple, maybe. (I remember I took a date to Barnes & Nobles and then the Chili’s by the Barnes & Noble — these places are long gone — and I saw the sportscaster and his anchor wife bickering in the Chili’s parking lot before I ate fajitas or whatever.) The sportscaster’s news anchor wife had an affair with the weatherman, a bold blond surfer specimen who frequently wore suspenders on air. This affair was something of an open secret, and I think some of the people involved were fired, or shuffled to different networks. It’s like the most low rent version of prime Fleetwood Mac you could imagine.

Anyway, the anchor and the weatherman are still married. He still does the weather and she’s the mayor of the city now. Her ex covers local sports on TV, the web, and the radio. I listen to his show in the mornings as a diversion from reality. It’s not very good, but it’s better than the complacent centrism of NPR. I haven’t been able to listen to music on morning drives in decades (I would have to pull the vehicle over and weep); I cannot follow audiobooks or even podcasts in the mornings; I take the inane meaningless chatter for aural breakfast. Today was the sportscaster’s current wife’s birthday. And Biblioklept’s.)

So well and anyway, I thought, I should do some kind of birthday post for the blog. So again, here we are. (Or maybe you have wisely left by this point.)

How about those promised stacks, those totem poles that keep getting moved from room to room? Here’s one:

What these books have in common is that some of them used to be in a bookcase that is now in Gainesville and I don’t know where to put them. All the B.S. Johnson books came from a B.S. Johnson jag I went on a few years ago, and they ended up tucked away — can’t stick them on the shelf of American postmodernists, right? And Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry? What an amazing novel? How have I not reread it. I got the Tim Tebow and Werner Herzog books for Christmas and I read them both. José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night is maybe my richest reading experience of the past year.

Here’s another picture of a stack of books:

I got another copy of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway a few weeks ago, which I think led to me pulling out some Woolfs (Wolves?); everything else here seems random, chaotic, emblematic maybe of my self-disgust—what am I doing with all these books? Of course I want to own a hardback first of Angela Carter’s Wise Children, even if I can’t find a proper home for it, right? And why wouldn’t I snap up every Alasdair Gray novel I come across? I think all these Evan Dara books were stacked up in the same missing bookcase that the B.S. Johnson books were stacked in; now they are loose, reminding me of the novelist’s diminishing career. Do I really need to hold on to Permanent Earthquake? The novel is terrible and the book itself is a cheaply-bound print-on-demand thing. It makes me feel sad. The Lost Scrapbook is amazing.

I was 27 when I started this blog.

What am I even doing here?

The Gordon Lish books were almost certainly smashed up against the B.S. Johnson and Evan Dara books — I think I wasn’t sure where to shelf them. I have been very mad at Gordon Lish for a few years now for reasons I promised not to divulge but which basically have to do with his being a flaming asshole. I finished Markus Werner’s novel The Frog in the Throat a week ago and the ending made me tear up. It’s a novel about aging and failure and fear; it’s very, very funny. The late great David Berman once said that Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers was his favorite novel. I loved it and I suppose I’ll refuse to read another Robert Stone novel. (Why?)

For some years, David Berman kept Biblioklept on the blog roll of his blog Menthol Mountains. That’s like the proudest I’ve ever been of anything that ever happened on this blog. I miss him.

Last stack — not really the last stack, there are at least three others, but I’m getting tired of this, in several senses:

John Keene’s collection/semi-novel Counternarratives is one of the best things I’ve read in forever. He refracts history through these layered polyphonic fictions that pull truth from the margins. My favorite piece in the collection reads like a riff on Melville’s Benito Cereno. I read Leonora Carrington’s novel The Stone Door, realized I misread it, then read it again. I have about four tabs open attempting to properly review it, but alas! I don’t know. I keep failing to find a grip into Di Benedetto’s The Suicides; maybe it’ll take soon. I started reading Antoine Volodine’s Mevlido’s Dreams around 12:30am this morning. It’s much funnier so far than I would have imagined. I’d mislaid the novel maybe a year ago; it was in a pile in the back of a bookcase that is now south and west of here.

I don’t have a way out of this post. I’ll do this blog at least one more year. Odysseus did twenty years, right? That’s a ridiculous stupid fucking sentence, the previous one.

This summer has been the weirdest one of my life, but it’s over now, right?

Blog about blogging for fourteen years (and not blogging so much lately)

Edwin Turner40 Comments

Yesterday afternoon, prepping notes for an evening class, I recalled that this blog Biblioklept turned fourteen. I was typing out some notes for an American literature class I teach (and have taught for years now) on Wednesday nights, and something about it resonated with me–What is on 9 September?–and then I remembered why the date should catch in my memory. I posted the first Biblioklept post on 9 Sept. 2006. It was on Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun and it was all of four sentences long. I was teaching AP Lang and AP Lit at an inner-city high school in Jacksonville, FL at the time, and I suppose that we must have been reading Raisin at the time. I still know pretty much every line of the play.

I know large chunks of the text that I was preparing my notes for last night, Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Some semesters I sleepwalked through my American lit classes, others I find myself revitalized by the material. Lately I’ve been sleepwalking–since 2017ish, if I’m honest, but having to do everything over Zoom has necessitated change. I spent a big chunk of the last few days revisiting Leslie Fiedler and Arnold Weinstein and Harold Bloom and Ralph Ellison on Huck Finn, trying to synthesize the material into something new that might zap me enough to zap my students through Zoom.

In years past I might’ve smuggled my notes into a blog post, a trick I used to pull every now and then, but I didn’t seem to have the energy when I got up today. I had a few composition classes to prep for, as well as remedial college reading class where half of the students speak English as a second language. I needed to figure out a way to communicate through the screen again, a way to figure out how to wrangle all my body language into a tiny digital square. It’s a bit exhausting, but we’ve all been exhausted, right? I’m healthy, my family is healthy, we have enough to eat, the air is still breathable, the water still potable, etc.

I’ve thought about ending this blog a lot in the past two years. I’ve seen so many of the blogs that I admired and conversed with and interacted with disappear over the last five or six or seven years. I still keep a blogroll (called “Elsewhere,” at the bottom of the site), but many of the links there have melted off into unupdated ghosts or, worse, collapsed into vacant 404s. (Is there an archive somewhere of Mark Wood’s wood s lot? Is someone–who?–going to keep David Berman’s Menthol Mountains up?). Other spaces that I had once thought were blogs, or at least bloggish, like The Millions and LitHub, turned out to be other things entirely.

Is this even a blog? A weblog? I’m not sure. For a long time Biblioklept seemed to me a hybrid of the “traditional” blogging that came out of LiveJournal and other spaces with the more image-centric universe of sites like tumblr. I’m not sure what it is anymore. I like to post paintings on here. I like figure painting in particular. I’m jealous of my wife’s art history degree, and have spent the past ten or so years trying to catch up to her.

I’d write about art more but I feel terribly unqualified.

I’d write about literature more but I feel exhausted by it so often, so terribly uninvigorated.

Here’s a big stack of books that I stacked up from three stacks stacked around our stack-stocked house:

Some of these are books that I’m reading and will finish soon (Walker Percys Lancelot, Walter Serner’s Last Loosening), some are books that I keep dipping in and out of (Domini’s The Sea-God’s Herb, The Big Fat Gary Lutz, Pierre Senges’s Studies of Silhouettes), some are books that have recently come into the house and need to be restacked elsewhere. At least one is an enigmatic new indie that I need to muster a review of (look, go buy Guillermo Stitch’s weirdass novel Lake of Urine. It might not be your cup of tea but it is in no way boring, either at the plot or prose level).

But yeah, I wish I blogged about books more.

When I look at that first four-sentence post back in 2006 I feel a bit envious. What the fuck made me feel it was acceptable to string those clauses together so cavalierly? Later September posts (like one on Klaus Kinski’s memoir, or a “review” of Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude show a little more dedication to fuller description (maybe even the germ of an inkling of an iota of analysis), but on the whole, those early posts–I mean, just looking at them now–I think I was having a lot more fun.

2006 was different and I was different–still in my mid (okay maybe late twenties), still sans children, still up to see a scuzzy band at a scuzzy bar on a week night even if it meant getting up hungover at 5:30am to teach high school downtown. I was closer in age to the students I taught then than I am to the students in my classes now. Most of my students now would, what, be starting kindergarten in 2006?

2006 was different and blogging seemed full of possibility—possibility of communication, transformation, elation, etceteration. There wasn’t really Facebook yet, or Twitter, or Reddit. Or rather, all of these social media platforms existed, but they were newborn, untested (at least by the masses), not the primary spaces for engagement over the internet. Internet 2.0 was just starting, really, and the second wave of blogging—with blogs like Biblioklept—seemed as vital as any other online presence.

(Should I mention that I only started blogging because two of my friends had started blogs and both of them, independently, insisted I do it because I’d be good at it? So I started, riffing mainly on books that I’d stolen, or at least gotten for free somehow, and those stories ran out, and at some point publishers started sending me books, and then a decade or so passed.)

Today, nothing about Biblioklept feels vital to me, and I realize the hubris in a 27 year old, a 30 year old, that thought the blog was important somehow. In retrospect, I realize that the feeling of doing something important (namely, discussing literature) was really the weird feeling of joy and energy I used to have. And sometimes I still grab a little piece of that old joy when I type out some characters, some words into the little big WordPress box. (I’ve had to retrofit to using WordPress’s old or “classic” editor. They updated to a block editor which I despise, another sign of my age perhaps. (Or maybe, just maybe, the block editor fucking sucks.)) And well so anyway yeah. I’m not really sure what the point of this post is. It’s not a rant, right? It kinda feels like a half-assed apology, but, like, for what?

I guess I wish I had it in me to post more—to post shorter riffs, maybe—to get back to that initial spirit of writing too fast and maybe not thinking too hard.

Anyway. I really do appreciate all of you who have read and looked and lurked for five, six, ten, twelve, fourteen years. Really.

Birthday — John Currin

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Birthday, 1999 by John Currin (b. 1962)

Screenshot 2018-06-07 at 1.28.31 PMScreenshot 2018-06-07 at 1.28.12 PM

Riff on William Shakespeare

Edwin Turner4 Comments
  1. William Shakespeare, the Greatest Living American Author, turns 450 today.
  2. (There may be some, uh, factual, problems with the preceding sentence, but I’ll let it stand).
  3. (After all, to write after Shakespeare requires some gall, a bit of fakery, maybe an outright lie or two).
  4. 450! (Could I even hit 450 points on a riff?)
  5. “Shakespeare invented us,” Harold Bloom repeatedly insists in his big fat book The Western Canon.
  6. (I might be misquoting; the prospect of putting the effort of fact checking into this riff horrifies me).
  7. “Shakespeare—whetting, frustrating, surprising and gratifying,” F. Scott Fitzgerald jotted down in his notebook.
  8. We don’t actually have a record of Shakespeare’s birth, although we do know he was baptized on 26 April 1564.
  9. And died 23 April 1616.
  10. It’s likely that Shakespeare was born on 23 April 1564.
  11. Or, perhaps: There’s something symmetrical, neat, poetic about Shakespeare dying on his birthday.
  12. Ingrid Bergman died on her birthday.
  13. As did Thomas Browne.
  14. As did Yasujrio Ozu.
  15. And, according to tradition: Moses, David, Mohammad.
  16. So why not Shakespeare, born on his deathday?
  17. We want a teleological neatness with Shakespeare: We want his last play to be The Tempest, a tragicomedy that somehow synthesizes all before it; we can claim Prospero a commanding stand-in for Shakespeare.
  18. (These claims overlooking of course that Shakespeare’s last work was likely a forgettable collaboration with John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen).
  19. The Two Noble Kinsmen was based on Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale.
  20. (Shakespeare of course “based” his works on other works; the man was not one for original plotting (thank goodness)).
  21. “Chaucer had a deeper knowledge of life than Shakespeare,” claimed Ezra Pound.
  22. “Let the reader contradict that after reading both authors, if he chooses to do so,” he truculently added.
  23. To Coleridge though Shakespeare was “myriad-minded Shakespeare” — Our myriad-minded Shakespeare.
  24. Dryden credited him with “the largest and most comprehensive soul.”
  25. Suggesting also that, “Shakespeare’s magic could not copied be.”
  26. I’m not sure about that.
  27. How many versions of Hamlet have been attempted?
  28. Were not some of these Hamlets magical—magical enough, at least?
  29. Ulysses?
  30. Infinite Jest?
  31. The Lion King?
  32. Oedipus Rex?
  33. David Markson points out somewhere—forgive me for not rising from my fat ass to go verify—that Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have read Sophocles’ Oedipus as there was no English translation yet available.
  34. And how many books did Shakespeare read?
  35. (Chaucer, often credited with a library of sixty).
  36. Speculation, speculation!
  37. Shakespeare Truthers.
  38. Or Anti-Stratfordians—whatever you want to call them.
  39. Walt Whitman was a Shakespeare Truther.
  40. Believing no commoner could write the plays, but “only one of the ‘wolfish earls’ so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works.”
  41. Amazing that, that Walt Whitman, who could so bombastically conceive himself every man, woman, child, a cosmos, etc.—that he couldn’t credit a commoner with the depth of imagination to produce the plays that Whitman called “greater than anything else in recorded literature.”
  42. David Markson: “Scholars who are convinced that Shakespeare must certainly have been a military man.  Or a lawyer.  Or closely associated with royalty.  Or even a Jew. To which Ellen Terry: Or surely a woman.”
  43. For some Shakespeare Truthers, evidence of his lack of authorship is to be found in the different ways he supposedly signed his name!
  44. Willm Shakp.
  45. William Shakspēr.
  46. Wm Shakspē.
  47. William Shakspere.
  48. Willm Shakspere.
  49. William Shakspeare.
  50. The last of these from his 1616 will, in which he famously bequeathed his second-best bed to his wife Anne Hathaway.
  51. “He was a rich country gentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer. Why did he not leave her his best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in peace?” Continue reading “Riff on William Shakespeare” →

“A Birthday”– Christina Rossetti

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birthday

Birthday — Dorothea Tanning

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10-Birthday_4

Dinner Menu for Mark Twain’s 70th Birthday

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“Birthday” (Live in ’89) — The Sugarcubes

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