Baby Nub and the Twins

First of all, I have to mention my favorite (for this week) "acknowledgment" from the beginning of an academic tome, Branimir M. Rieger's "Dionysus in Literature." Hewing closely to convention, he thanks his colleagues, his editors, the contributors to the volume (a collection of essays), his parents, his children. And then, this, the final sentence:

"And to Katanga, Major Tom, Baby Schnupkin, Lothar, Mookie, Nub, Baby Nub, Pockel, the Twins, Mousie, Lobotz, and Tiniest Of ..."

Um. Wait, no, read to the end...

"for their feline encouragement, and especially to Molly."

Without commenting in depth on how delightful it is that Molly (if Molly is in fact human, as I suspect) is folded in to the long train of meowing supporters, I just have to say this: Tiniest Of! Best cat name ever. And the idea of acknowledging your cats in an academic work (particularly one that takes as its subject madness in literature) - Awesome.

Or in the new Britspeak parlance that my friend and I are trying unsuccessfully to adopt .... "Immense."

Contingencies in Casterbridge

"The Mayor of Casterbridge" gallops apace, although I approach it with a growing sense of doom since my flatmate Anthony told me that it was a terribly sad book. I don't know why I believed that, totally against form and precedent, Hardy would have written a Jane Austen novel in which everything ends happily after some witty convulsions of plot. But I did. And now I fear for these poor characters.

There is a strange aversion to implicitness in the prose that I hadn't remembered from my one other experience with Hardy, although it may very well be characteristic. An example, from a scene in which Henchard reads a letter from an ex while his wife lies in her sickbed:


"Henchard breathed heavily. 'Poor thing - better you had not known me! Upon my heart and soul, if ever I should be left in a position to carry out that marriage with thee, I ought to do it - I ought to do it, indeed.'

The contingency that he had in his mind was of course the death of Mrs. Henchard."


Of course. Thanks for the clarification.

This novel is pretty much the opposite of a Henry James novel. In Henry James you wade through miles of text and then think, "Wait, did that really just happen?", aware that if you returned to the passage you would find all evidence of the event to be tricksy and double-edged, yielding multiple possible interpretations. The Hardy of "The Mayor of Casterbridge" would follow up such a passage with a paragraph break and the statement, "And then they had sex. Twice."

Is this a conscious narrative choice on Hardy's part? If so, to what end?

A window into my compulsive reading life

I must admit to using my recreational reading as a carrot to encourage me to do work, alternating academic reading (divided into manageable chunks) with New Yorkers, novels, comics. This does not always yield the most efficient results, but it is highly satisfying. I have also developed a curious relay* method to organize my reading and guarantee that I don't favor any particular genre (reading nothing, as is sometimes my wont, but young adult novels). I read three books at any one time, going through a generic to-do list in the following order:

1) Book groups (I now belong, on Yahoo groups, to a Dickens group, a British Classics group, a Literary fiction group, and a Twentieth Century Writers group)
2) Young adult, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Crime, or Thriller
3) Book from the 1001 Books I must Read Before I Die list **
4) Comics/Graphic novels
5) Random fiction
6) Nonfiction
7) Drama

As a result, I am currently at work on two other books in addition to "The Mayor of Casterbridge:" Paul Auster's "The New York Trilogy," which has delighted me by referencing my favorite Poe character (William Wilson), and James McClure's "The Artful Egg." I will leave you with the pleasing (and then troubling, which makes it all the more pleasing) opening line of McClure's mystery:

"A hen is an egg's way of making another egg."




*My mind is on relays at the moment, since I just turned on the television to record the Carolina women's basketball and soccer games and discovered that Animal Planet is televising a delightful sport which sends a series of dogs over hurdles to a machine which shoots tennis balls into their mouths. Nothing (except lumber sports and a curious hybrid of kickboxing and wrestling that I like to call boxling) amuses me quite as much as dog sports.

**I should note that I have another newfound enthusiasm for a webpage called Lists of Bests, which allows you to create or adopt lists (of books to read, movies to watch, places to visit, people to meet, or anything else really) any track your progress through them. Here is the absurd group of lists I am ... pursuing.