forty-two: august 2004

8.31.2004 tuesday
 The Aubrey/Maturin Novels by Patrick O’Brian, (Master and Commander, Post Captain, H. M. S. Surprise, The Mauritius Command, Desolation Island, Fortune of War, The Surgeon's Mate, The Ionian Mission, Treason's Harbour, The Far Side of the World, The Reverse of the Medal, The Letter of Marque, The Thirteen Gun Salute, The Nutmeg of Consolation, The Truelove, The Wine-Dark Sea, The Commodore, The Yellow Admiral, The Hundred Days, Blue at the Mizzen) The past as epic fantasy – with bird watching. A 5,000-page buddy movie (but not the crap Hollywood version). Introvert and extrovert fall in love, go around the world (without violating Article XXIX). Best is #13 – tea with an orangutan atop a volcano.
-Brian
 Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians by Pierre Clastres translated by Paul Auster Paul Auster’s foreword is often reviewed; it’s pure Auster: death, chance, coincidence. The book amazes, apart from its provenance. Clastres reveals something astonishing about the Guayakis’ nomadism. If this book were not true, a structuralist anthropologist would have had to invent it.
-Diana
 8.30.2004 monday
 A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell edited by Jonathan Safran Foer I usually prefer paperback books, but this hardback is worth the extra cost and bulk. Photos of Cornell’s boxes deliver a true, three-dimensional feeling, and the writings themselves —though they vary greatly— often focus on the internal/interior mindset evoked by “small” art.
-Jen
 8.29.2004 sunday
 The Labyrinth by Catherynne M. Valente Suspend judgment when beginning this novel: the swelling of gorgeous language and imagery initially leads one to wonder whether it has a backbone. It does, though no center or end. Resemblences to Carroll and Dante, but utterly unique unto itself. A quest-that-is-not.
-Stevie
 8.28.2004 saturday
 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys Rhys weaves a convincing and nightmarish tale of an early 19th century Creole heiress, into the backdrop of Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Giving flesh and bones to the first Mrs. Rochester, her madness, and her eventual internment in the attic of Thornfiend Hall.
-kenn
 8.27.2004 friday
 Wilderness: The Discovery of a Continent of Wonder by Rutherford Platt A moose yet swims, making a V. But men walked, mapless, over secretive America during centuries we forget, or ascribe to the antlered. Platt plats biomes (Green Woods, Far Grass) earnestly, like a Disneyfied Muir--postmodernists groan, but Nature's a page-turner.
-Erika
 8.26.2004 thursday
 Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons This graphic novel’s retired "costumed adventurers" ask themselves, amid Cold War tensions, what sacrifices can or should be made for peace (personal or international). Successful suspense, tightly interweaving storylines, and little details create a deceptively real world out of a comic book.
-Eve
 8.25.2004 wednesday
 Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin I only recently accepted that, despite being locked in the genre ghetto, Le Guin is one of the best living writers we've got. Her latest is strange, simple, closer to Nordic myth than a recognizable novel. Initially confusing, but slowly becomes quite moving.
-Timothy
 8.24.2004 tuesday
 Epileptic 1 (a translation of Parts 1-3 of L'Ascencion du Haut-Mal) by David B “Imagination” is just rearranging things we encountered before the age of ten. David B grew up with art from everywhere. Aztec, Merovingian, Tokugawa all jumble together, overlaid with Max Ernst. The story – about family and illness – is moving and funny and sad.
-Brian
 8.23.2004 monday
 Sad Little Breathing Machine by Matthea Harvey Harvey’s second poetry collection is consistently clever, mostly in ways that I find appealing. The intimate machinations suggested by the book’s title—being neither quite man nor machine—are present throughout, evidence of a poet who appreciates both fetishized and conversational language.
-Jen
 8.22.2004 sunday
 Bouvard and Pecuchet by Gustave Flaubert I never finished this book; neither did Flaubert. Bouvard and Pecuchet’s projects come to naught. Still, their lament rings in my ears every workday: “Que de choses à connaître! que de recherches -- si on avait le temps! Hélas, le gagne-pain l'absorbait.”
-Diana
 8.21.2004 saturday
 Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab The Body Farm, Where the Dead Do Tell Tales by William M. Bass and Jon Jefferson Horrifying, poignant, and hilarious – the latter especially when Bass ruins his wife’s stove while boiling human heads. The goal of Bass’ science is justice, gained with help from colleagues, students, or the dead who speak to him through their inert, shattered bones.
-Becky
8.20.2004 friday
 For the Time Being by Annie Dillard Annie Dillard's For the Time Being is a waltz of clouds, clay, Jewish scholars, birth defects, and the divine strangeness of travel, unhurriedly linking themselves into a fragile proposition about the nature of God and the dissonance between individual and collective being.
-Erika
 8.19.2004 thursday
 The Bad Girl’s Guide to Getting What You Want by Cameron Tuttle Meaning "a sassy, go-getting and smart attitude" rather than "terrible" in this context, badness will apparently get you laid, a better job, and a better lifestyle. Fun illustrations, anecdotes, and intriguing, surprisingly useful tips give this fluffy-looking book some unexpected real-world heft.
-Eve
 8.18.2004 wednesday
 Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson A virtuosic meditation on storytelling and heredity, to be sure, but also hysterically funny. More postmodern tropes than you could shake a stick at (seven parallel storylines in different typefaces!) simmer underneath great insights into drugs, dogs, universities, water-babies and crazy mothers.
-Timothy
 8.17.2004 tuesday
 Extra Virgin: A Young Woman Discovers the Italian Riviera, Where Every Month Is Enchanted by Annie Hawes Two wry English sisters buy a house in Liguria amid the charming, maddening peasants. The sisters’ struggles and eventual acclimation take a long time, during which the village becomes a center of olive oil production. This book starts slow, but riches follow.
-Becky
 8.16.2004 monday
 A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch Murdoch’s characters are monstrously self-deluded and their trains of thought are revolting-- but their interactions throw questions of psychology and morality into fascinating relief. Brief, masterful: possibly the best introduction to Murdoch. Fog, curtains, and lies-- truncating what is seen.
-Stevie
8.15.2004 sunday
 Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns An English village undone by a flood and mass outbreaks of madness. Not so much the idiocy of rural life as its slow, hideous-but-beautiful interlacings of corruption and generation. Zola without the tendentious biologism. John Berger without hyper-valuation of the eternal feminine.
-Diana
 8.14.2004 saturday
 What's the Matter With Kansas? by Thomas Frank More coherent and amusing than most recent political treatises, Frank deftly illustrates how the nominal Left still thinks political affiliation is class-centric, while the Right has moved the debate to center on ethics. Will raise the ire of anyone who still cares.
-Timothy
 8.13.2004 friday
 Annie Oakley’s Girl by Rebecca Brown A collection of short stories in which gender and other fantastical constructs are allowed room to breathe. “Folie a Deux” is probably my favorite, a horrifying story in which two nameless, genderless people maim themselves in order to become more erotically linked.
-Jen
 8.12.2004 thursday
 A World Lit Only By Fire, by William Manchester The Middle Ages cracked under excesses enabled by its own institutions, and fell to the reactionary forces of humanism and science, argues Manchester. There’s also a bit about papal incest, Martin Luther in the john, Magellan’s south Pacific impregnations, and da Vinci.
-Eve
 8.11.2004 wednesday
 ’Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre’ Photographs of a River Life by Maggie Lee Sayre, edited by Tom Rankin “Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre” (the way she chose to sign her name) lived most her life on a riverboat near my own growin’-up place in Kentucky. This collection of her photos includes family portraits, family portraits with huge catfish, and haunting waterscapes.
-Jen
Beside the Ocean of Time by George MacKay Brown Brown writes from the thesis that land has its own narrative presence and linear history is almost abitrary. Dimly connected stories that never quite make up the advertised novel, but which have a cumulative power that left me sobbing in a park.
-Timothy
 8.10.2004 tuesday
 The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime by Miles Harvey Explores the history and economics of cartography, intertwined with the story of one map stealer’s exploits. Harvey’s writing style is a little heavy-handed, employing all the obvious mapping metaphors, but the sections on cartographic technique and lore make it a worthwhile read.
-Jen
A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion to the Complete Seafaring Tales of Patrick O’Brian by Dean King with John B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes Mammothrept. Evert. Futtock. Ragabash. Furcula. Pommelion. Roborate. Scrutineer. Scunner. Xebec. Tumble-home. Marthambles. Barmecide. Sniggle. These stories are not about adventure or battle. They’re about making a strange world out of strange words – Tolkein for grown-ups. The past is as much a fantasy as Middle-Earth.
-Brian
 8.9.2004 monday
 Pastorelles by John Taggart The languages and images of these poems are simultaneously elegantly spare and complexly layered, moving flawlessly between stylized and common structures, which seems entirely appropriate for a meditation on the land and people of rural Pennsylvania. Taggart’s humor is like thumbs twiddling.
-Jen
 8.8.2004 sunday
 Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls by Lucy Corin There are no psychokillers in this novel; it's about growing up female amid the fact of psychokillers' hype: their everydayness, their seriality, their indistinctness, their media-aural ghostliness. It's a novel about the ways that girls, too, are serialized, mediated, and perhaps doomed.
-Diana
 8.7.2004 saturday
 The Rising Sun by Douglas Galbraith The Darien Expedition of the 1690's bankrupted Scotland and led to the Union of Parliaments, yet is now mostly forgotten. All the prostitution, scurvy, drinking, corruption, treachery, murder and nationalistic fervor you'd expect from the period, but with an unexpectedly elegaic overtone.
-Timothy
Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli Simple-minded little Misha survives via his wits in the time of the Nazis. This gripping portrait transcends war clichés and ends “favorably,” rather than "happily.” Disregard the dreadful cover and discover a beautifully wrought story of perseverance amid the horrors of war.
-Becky
 8.6.2004 friday
 Beat Not the Poor Desk by Marie Ponsot and Rosemary Deen With grace and acute intelligence, Ponsot and Deen argue that the structures of literature reside within us, and the art of writing is best learned inductively. A detailed guide for writing teachers; also sheds light on the unconsciously-established processes of experienced writers.
-Stevie
8.5.2004 thursday
 The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn. Skip the metaphor-heavy introduction. This book’s strong message is that you learn about the real world through doing, not by enduring thirteen years of factory-worker-producing classroom education. Inspiring ("I can learn again"), yet crushingly humbling ("I wasted so much time").
-Eve
 8.4.2004 wednesday
 Eightball #23: The Death-Ray by Daniel Clowes Supplements and supersedes Jonathan Lethem's unwieldy 'The Fortress of Solitude' in just 41 full-color pages. The most disquieting inquiry into the ethical use of power (and unlikely superpower) to appear in recent years, and the best argument for teen smoking yet published.
-Timothy
 8.3.2004 tuesday
 The Holy Bible by various authors (Edition/translation unknown) For a writer with so much experience, as Author and Creator of all existence, I would expect more sure-handed piece of work. Too obsessed with genealogy, and the prose style is almost as changeable as Joyce's in Ulysses. Still, good lyric passages.
-Brian
 8.2.2004 monday
 Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands by Allen H. Eaton The order in which I’ve read this has been abitrary. The anthropological language of 1937 is ornate; Eaton’s belief in preservation of Southern Highland handicrafts is quite overt and driving. I enjoy the photos of Appalachian craftspeople, their technical and familiar turns-of-phrase.
-Jen


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