one woman's reading: books of the Baroque year both future and past

What a difference a year and a day makes!

I've just discovered this among my files, as it were, and it bears so little resemblance to anything I could possibly write this weekend that I'm publishing it as a curio.

I (or someone kind of like me) wrote:

Four days into 2007, and long after all those newspapers did their "books of the year" sections, we're looking into the abyss of a new Reading Year. Baroque Mansions is piled high with things to read in 2007 (& I need my eyes to hold out this time; one of them is aching even now, but I think it's just an ache).

I have plans, I have commissions, and I even have a few little old hankerings. Sometimes I miss the simple pleasure of reading a novel, for no other reason than that it looked fun; of course there is still impulse-reading, and I do waste ("wa-aste?!?!?") an inordinate amount of time reading internet-things, but it isn't the same as when I used to read for... the story... and the plucky little characters...

Then there's the day job. Lots of items of professional interest are piled up in two different places around Baroque Mansions, alongside the poetry piles, the essay and criticism piles (Hazlitt, Sydney Smith, anyone?), and the odd little forlorn novel pile. Oh and I bought a proof copy of Larkin's letters the other day. I've put it on top of Lowell's letters. They're both in pink dustwrappers.

Plus, I have decided it is time to learn more about typography, properly. My happiness may depend on it. That's another pile.

It's becoming clearer all the time that I will never read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls - a book I just, one day in the second-hand shop, thought looked very interesting. And a friend had liked it. But that ain't enough to cut it any more.

Several of the "book blogs" seem to list books people have "read," as if they pick up a book, read it till it's finished, and then read another book in the same fashion, for no other reason than that they "like" them. They read, or hear, about it, and if they decide they might like it, they read it. Then they read another one; and they talk about them in terms of whether they thought they were "good" or not.

I mention all this only because it sounds so completely different from how, what, and why I read that it might as well be ice skating or hill walking. Don't they dip into a hundred books, on the grounds that they feel they "should know what's about"? Don't they read books they dislike? Do they really finish everything? When can you be said to be "reading" something - is it when you take the same book every morning on the tube? Is it like going steady? (Uh oh. I take a different book every day on the tube, depending on my mood and what I was dreaming about. Plus there are usually a couple in my bag, forgotten, from previous days.) Don't they get sidetracked by trains of thought? Do they not read any criticism or non-fiction? Is it always just for entertainment - novel after novel - and never for elucidation, research, education or critical analysis? (Having said which, I do wish I read more fiction.)

(I say they; it should probably be you. I know I'm the one who's out of kilter, not you. And this is why I can never go into a bookshop on a date, or whatever, because they think it's fun to browse, and my cover would be instantly blown. I say would be - but it has happened. They don't like it.)

Ah, well. Here's the list, what I can remember. Of course there was lots more that I read standing up in Border's or Waterstone's. But, like eating with the fridge door open, that probably doesn't count.

Ashes for Breakfast, by the German poet Durs Grünbein
Atomised, Michel Houellebecq
two novels by Mary Wesley
all of Wendy Cope's collections
Auden: essays, poems, "Letter to Lord Byron"
Table Talk of WH Auden, by Alan Ansen (who died a couple of months ago)
Swithering, by Robin Robertson
District and Circle, bits of, Seamus Heaney
Rapture, Carol Ann Duffy
The Optimist, Joshua Mehigan
Samuel Johnson, by Walter Jackson Bate - bits of
"Rambler" essays, a couple of, Johnson
Belle de Jour, blog book (far less sensational than promised; am I so unshockable?)
Charles Lamb and Elia, ed. JP Morpugo, ancient Penguin
Boudicca & Co, Jane Holland (Salt Publishing)
Faber Book of Sonnets and Penguin Book of Sonnets, in tandem, over the summer
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag (Queen of Supposition and Sweeping Extrapolation) (I know, she died this year too)
Selected Poems, Geoffrey Hill, in beauteous new Penguin
Selected Poems, Greg Delanty, for an interview that never happened
title essay plus a couple, The Geography of the Imagination, Guy Davenport
Object Lessons, Eavan Boland
Harbour Lights, Derek Mahon
Almanacs, by Jen Hadfield
Gethsemene Day, Dorothy Molloy
Life Studies, Lowell
The Wounded Surgeon (Confession & Transformation in Six American poets), Adam Kirsch
Western Wind: an Intro to Poetry, David Mason and John Frederick Nims
Ulysses, James Joyce (bits of; much better than the audiobook, sweet as that was)
"The Dead", James Joyce
great chunks of Less Than One by Joseph Brodsky (I just don't really do that "I read this book from start to finish" thing)
various essays by Ian Hamilton
Immigrant Blues, Goran Simic
The Ode Less Travelled, Stephen Fry (more arch than a gothic cathedral, but technically sound enough)
I spent a most of a week reading Martin Amis' "Horrorism" article from the Guardian (horrorism is bloody right)
Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk (bits of)
The Forsyte Saga (started, twice, for reasons stated above)
Bleak House (ditto)
short stories of Elizabeth Bowen
Autumn Journal, MacNeice; about four times
Louis MacNeice: a Study, by Edna Longley
Moon Wheels, Ruth Fainlight
Selected Poems, Ruth Fainlight

Well, that's what I can remember as standing out. To a certain extent it's arbitrary: there was some Wallace Stevens, some Coleridge, some Keats, I think there was some Anne Sexton in the summer. Plus there have been reams of articles, interviews, poems etc, downloaded from the web. Plus endless magazines...

My book of the year would probably be Charles Lamb.

elegantly dressed thoughtful dressing and the comfort of things

Today was an arrangement in black and grey, both inside and out. For some reason this morning, after a gruelling night's sleep featuring more than one dream of open sores on shoulder blades (!), following which I woke up at 5am, it seemed extra important to look put together and pretty. But no actual colour. Just a soft colour blank. Grey lacy tights, a black pencil skirt made of something slightly shiny, a grey jumper with angora in it, clear sparkly earrings, and my salt-&-pepper coat and grey knitted scarf. The sparkly shiny things and all the textures were critical. (Three years ago there was a death, and I spent a month wrapped in pashminas, mainly a black one with embroidery.) You know, who says clothes don't matter. I was so bleary I could hardly see, this morning, but I could see in the ladies' room mirror that I hardly even looked like myself.

As if to back me up, these words from Joseph Brodsky, from beyond the grave - found on my fave new blog, Linda Grant's The Thoughtful Dresser: "I'm not going to recoil from the superficial," he wrote. "Surfaces, which are what the eye first falls on, usually say more than their contents..."

By the way, the Thoughtful Dresser has had a poll: who is more important, Chanel or Dior? As usual I let my heart rule and voted for Dior. Chanel won the poll of course and it is true - she gave us the little black dress, the sun tan and Chanel 5 - but I wouldn't be true to type if I didn't love Dior more. It occured to me only as I came home this evening that I owe her my silhouette (sans coat; the coat's a little more Dior, if you had to choose).

Have not had a thought all day long, to entertain any of you bunnies with. I sat at my computer and spaced out and looked sad, and people came and asked if I was all right, which I had been, more or less, until they asked.

I'm supposed to be thinking about a recalcitrant centrepiece poem that's playing me up, about a medieval atrocity where 1,000 villagers were burned to death in a church at the behest of Louis VII, who was partly trying to show off to impress his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. I think she was only about 18 but she was already deeply scary. Today may not be the day for that.

I've ordered some books on the internet:

1. Anthony Hecht talks to Philip Hoy, research for my Hecht piece

2. Silence (pron. the French way), which is either a translation of or a disposition on a C13 French roman, Le Roman de Silence, which has been sweetly and kindly given to me as a gift to write about, and jolly interesting it sounds too, if only I had an idea in my head

3. A book of knitting patterns by Bronwyn Lowenthal, whose lusciously vintage-looking handknits are available, at prices I can't afford, in boutiques around and about. See those fingerless mittens? Yes.

My house is all torn apart with this room-moving. There's an enormous chipboard panel - the end of a bookcase, turned Art, covered with graffiti and drawings and rave flyers and an old NY state licence plate, and a CD, and there are holes punched in it one of which has a baseball perfectly embedded in it like a meteor. It's leaning on the pink couch. It's enormous. I've been asked to keep it. It has three-inch bolts sticking out the ends. As it is the end of an ex, erstwhile, no-more bookcase, the files it housed have been piled helpfully, by the Urban Warrior, in front of my wardrobe door.

The Ikea website is shite. It won't let me buy my bed. It keeps telling me my card has been declined, but my card is fine. To be fair the customer service people did get right back to me, but she says that their website is incompatible with: a) Vista, b) Macs, and c) Firefox. But £340 of my money is apparently now in a "holding account," meaning Ikea hasn't got it but the bank thinks - for the moment - that it's been paid out, meaning I haven't got it either. So I tried again, on the pc, in Explorer, and not on Vista. Did it work? No.

I could start the green bloero jumper for Mlle B. This knitting thing is good, you know, but it also alarms me somewhat because it makes you kind of non-, or pre-, verbal. (I know, I know. Chance would be a fine thing. When will it start working? I hear you all cry.)

All I want to do is go to sleep. I will put some washing on first.

tantalus comes to baroque mansions

Things you can do with yourself in the summer Part 47:


Brodsky talks about Akhmatova

Learn Russian. (Get started now and you'll be up to speed when Natalia comes back in September!) I have often been sorely tempted but I just don't know how I'd fit it in with everything else... there are human limits, after all.

But even if you don't learn Russian - and God knows I have given it the old college try, but I think it might be easier if you have someone to practice it on - do watch this video anyway. First of all, Brodsky sounds beautiful. Russian is a beautiful, musical language, with all its complicated vowels, and it is so densely meaningful that the meaning comes over even if you haven't a clue what's going on. I once cried listening to someone read Eugene Onegin in the original. In a bookshop.

Secondly, this interview contains both video and audio of Akhmatova herself and it is absolutely amazing. There's a picture of her with the (very young, smiling, adorable) Brodsky that is heartbreaking.

I set out, by the way, to write about WS Merwin, whose new Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) I'm reading (and in fact reviewing). But there were only two videos of Merwin, and in the one where he's reading his own work you can barely see or hear him, so that wasn't much use. Nothing ever being in vain, however, I found this other treasure - a rather Merwinian approach if I do say so. So all's not lost, & I'm sure there'll be some Merwin to follow. I'm really enjoying him (oddly, he's sort of like the antithesis of Russian).

one girl and her favourite poet

"Sometime in the late 1970s, as an impressionable teenager in love with Pound and Eliot, I came across an interview with Joseph Brodsky in which he said he had learned English by translating William Shakespeare and John Donne. At the time this impressed me almost literally as a command to spend a summer at my Russian uncle’s dining room table in upstate New York, surrounded by bilingual editions—Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova—and a huge red-and-white dictionary, learning rudimentary poetic Russian while my cousins were all at the pool listening to the Grateful Dead. At the time I learned the structure of a new language, and my own ways of parsing meaning. In the years that followed, when I had myself (admittedly through a kind of choice) left my country of birth and started to assemble an intellectual identity, I learned a lot more from this poet who lived out his exile so near my home..."

Read the rest in the Contemporary Poetry Review.

Of course, now it's out I can only see the things I didn't say, and the things I should have thought through better! But for better or worse there it is.