WHAT DAN READ

Yesterday’s post about the challenge of deciding what I’m going to read next was in the back of my mind when I stumbled on What Dan Read, a scanned copy of the list of 3,599 books that Dan Pelzer read from 1962 until shortly before he died this past July. The scanned copy is intriguing, but I found it difficult to read. If you have the same challenge, you can find a more readable copy, a pdf provided by the public library in Columbus, Ohio. The list alone is rather heart-warming, especially in this day when Americans are reading less for pleasure.

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STILL READING; STILL WONDERING WHAT TO READ NEXT

I’ve written more than once — see here and here and here and here — about my struggle to decide what to read and why to read it. I suppose I’m still in withdrawal from years of teaching, when each fall and summer I would have to lay out the list of texts that I’d be reading with my students the next semester. It provided a structure to the reading, and I was always fascinated to see the sorts of discussions that were prompted by reading the texts in the community of a classroom. So many times, these discussions helped me to see something I hadn’t seen before in a text that I had read dozens of times.

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STATE OF EMERGENCY, INDEED

Walter Benjamin:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth [and even the twenty-first] century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge — unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

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READING, INTELLECT, EMOTION

Siri Hustvedt:

Experiences of powerful emotions linger in the mind; experiences of tepid ones don’t. Great books, it seems to me, are distinguished by an urgency in the telling, a need that one can feel viscerally. Reading is not a purely cognitive act of deciphering signs; it is taking in a dance of meanings that has resonance far beyond the merely intellectual. Dostoyevsky is important to me, and I can place him in Russian intellectual history. I can talk about his biography, his ideas, his epilepsy, but that is not why I feel so close to his works. My intimacy is a product of my reading experiences. Every time I remember Crime and Punishment, I relive my feelings of pity, horror, despair, and redemption. The novel is alive in me.

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EMACS EXCITEMENT

While speaking to a rather large public gathering of folks a couple of decades ago, my wife announced that there were two times that she had seen me excited. I think she was being a bit hyperbolic, but it’s true that I tend to be rather, well, perhaps understated is the most gracious way to put it. I might say even-keeled. Some would say boring.

But I was sitting alone at my computer this morning when I found myself brimming with excitement — twice. I think I even chuckled out loud and shifted my weight in my chair. Simply put, I had a couple of those “wow” emacs moments. I don’t have as many of those moments now as I once did — not because I’m fully aware of everything that emacs can do, but rather because I’ve settled into a standard routine in which I can do what I think I need to be doing. If I were inclined to be a little hyperbolic, I might say that when I’m writing I am emacs and emacs is me. (But, then, I’m not hyperbolic, so I’m not likely to say that.)

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EGREGIOUSLY GREGARIOUS OR GREGARIOUSLY EGREGIOUS

Lydia Davis:

Did you know that gregarious and egregious both have the word for “flock” or “herd” at their origins? (If you are gregarious, you like to mingle with the flock; if a thing is egregious, it stands out from the herd.)

Essays One, p. 246

HOW MUCH TREE IS IN THAT BOOK YOU'RE READING?

Harriet Rix:

In a book of 80,000 words there is an enormous amount of trapped energy: a library of borrowed tree stability. If a tree is twenty when it is cut and pulped, it would have taken about four months’ continuous work for that tree to produce the biomass for one book.

The Genius of Trees: How they mastered the elements and shaped the world

VICE AND VIRTUE IN FICTION AND THE REAL WORLD

Hi, there, world. It’s been a while. I’ve been on the road quite a bit in the last six weeks, and I’ve been consumed by important family matters. Though I’ve had all sorts of ideas about something I might write about in the blog, I’ve not had the energy and discipline to come up with anything I thought was worth posting. But the longer I go without posting, the more likely this will be yet another still-born blog, sinking into the internet wasteland of so many others (including a couple of mine from the old days). I’ve been saying for more than a week now that I really should either write something or admit that I won’t be writing.

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WEB PRESENTATION REDUCES THE PERSON

Zadie Smith:

“When a human being becomes a set of data on a Web site like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t feel more free, they just look more owned.

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WHAT IF SOCIAL STATUS WERE BASED ON TIME OF ARRIVAL?

Jamaica Kincaid:

What if social status in American society were based on nothing else but time of arrival? By now, the very top of American society would be thoroughly integrated, if not majority African American. And instead of Jesse Jackson having to defend every ridiculous idea he has against some equally ridiculous counter-idea, his ridiculous ideas would be the ones by which we all had to live. For example, I do not like affirmative action, but only as it might apply to me; if I suspect that I were the victim of this idea, I believe I would appreciate the element of kindness in it and say, “Thank you very much. How nice,” and politely reject this favor. But affirmative action seems appropriate to many people whose ancestors were brought here centuries ago, and so who am I, someone who just got off the boat yesterday, someone coming from another bleak crevice of the world, to tell them otherwise.

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