lapsus linguae

Reading List 2006

2006 was a wonderful year for reading thanks in large part to the small but focused libraries of The Banff Centre and The Ucross Foundation and to S. W. Welch and The Word, my two favourite bookstores in Montreal.

“In the crush of a lightning technology that slams out computerized volumes stuck together with a baleful glue, it is good now and then to be reminded of a book as something worthy of body-love. The nostrils also read.” Cynthia Ozick

Here’s a not quite chronological list of the books my nostrils and I read in 2006:

Robert Allen, The Encantadas
Samuel Beckett, Watt
Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor & Memory
Louise Steinman, The Souvenir
Roy Parvin, The Longest Road in America
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro & Other Stories
Annie Proulx, Heart Songs
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
George Saunders, Civil War Land in Bad Decline
Alan Garganus, Plays Well With Others
Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
Stacey Richter, My Date With Satan
Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
Annie Proulx, Bad Dirt
Ron Carlson, The Hotel Eden
George Saunders, Pastoralia
Mary Oliver, White Pine
Honor Moore, Red Shoes
Annie Proulx, Close Range
Karen Russell, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
Julian Barnes, The Lemon Table
Gore Vidal, Burr
André Gide, Lafcadio’s Adventures
Marguerite Yourcenar, Coup de Grace
Catullus, The Poems of Catullus
Tracy Emin, Strangeland
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto
Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen
John McPhee, Rising from the Plains
Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
Doris Lessing, The Sweetest Dream
H. M. van den Brink, On the Water
Jonathan Garfinkel, Glass Psalms
Barry Hannah, Bats Out of Hell
Amy Hempel, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Guy Davenport, The Death of Picasso
Alexis O’Hara, (more than) Flithy Lies
William Kennedy, Ironweed
Gertrude Stein, Blood on the Dining Room Floor
Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
Kenzaburo Oe, A Personal Matter
Richard Ford, A Multitude of Sins
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Project for a Revolution in New York
Simone de Beauvoir, When Things of the Spirit Come First
Michael Boyce, Monkey
Ali Smith, Hotel World
Tracy Chevalier, Girl WIth A Pearl Earing
Victoria Glendinning, Electricity
Iris Murdoch, A Word Child
Zsuzsi Gartner, All the Anxious Girls on Earth
David Bergen, The Time In Between
Sharon Olds, The Gold Cell
Don McKay, Another Gravity
Kunt Hamsun, Hunger
Greg Hollingshead, The Roaring Girl
Mavis Gallant, Home Truths
Sharon Olds, Satan Says
Joey Dubuc, Neither Either Nor Or
Rainer Maria Rilke, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories
Julia Darling, Crocodile Soup
Carole Angier, Jean Rhys
Mary V. Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Lousie Bryant
Djuna Barnes, New York
Ali Smith, The Accidental
Sheila Heti, The Middle Stories
Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
André Gide, Strait is the Gate
Tobias Wolff, In the Garden of North American Martyrs
Robert Allen, Standing Wave
Germaine de Stael, Corinne, or Italy
Tennessee WIlliams, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone
Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller
Montaigne, Travel Journal
Karen Connelly, The Lizard Cage
Mary Robison, Believe Them
Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment
Golda Fried, Nellcot is my Darling
Adrian Michael Kelly, Down Sterling Road
Nicole Brossard, The Blue Books
Todd Swift, ed., Future Welcome
Lalumiére & Moser, eds, Lust for Life
Barbara Gowdy, The Romantic
Alister Macleod, No Great mischief
Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners
Dorothea Straus, Virgins and Other Endangered Species
Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good
Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer & Le bateau ivre

Reading List 2005: http://luckysoap.com/lapsuslinguae/2005/12/reading-list-2005.html
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Yellow Door Reading

I’ll be reading at The Yellow Door, Thursday, April 27, 2006

3625 Aylmer (between Pine and Prince Arthur) Tel: 514-398-6243

Doors open 7:00 pm Reading 7:30 pm At the door $5

Poets & Prose Writers & Musicians featured:

J. R. Carpenter Poet, fiction writer & new media artist. A two-time winner of the CBC/QWF Quebec Short Story Competition (2004 & 2006), her short fiction & poetry have been published in journals & anthologies in Canada, US, & UK. More information about her writing and web art projects can be found on Luckysoap.com

Stephen Morrissey Published seven books of poetry & chapbooks. He is a founding member of the Vehicule Poets. He is editor and publisher of www.coraclepress.com Visit the poet: www.stephenmorrissey.ca

Victoria Stanton Performance artist who has presented her work nationally, in the U.S., Europe, Australia & Japan. She is the co-author with Vincent Tinguely of Impure: Reinventing the Word (conundrum press, 2001).

Fortner Anderson Co-founder with Ian Ferrier of the Wired on Words record label. His CD, six silk purses, is forthcoming. Read at the Mondes parallè le 50//litté rature festival in Lille, France.

Talleen Hacikyan Fiction writer & visual artist. First prize winner at the 2005 Victoria School of Writing Postcard Story Competition. Selected for the 2003-2004 QWF Mentorship Program. Short story published in Ararat.

Ilona Martonfi Blue Poppy, a first book of poems TBA published by Coracle (2006.) Published chapbook, Visiting the Ridge (Coracle). Poet, editor, producer/host Yellow Door readings. Co-producer/host of Lovers & Others.

Producer/host Ilona Martonfi Tel/Fax 514-939-4173

www.yellowdoor.org/coffeehouse/spoken_word.html/
. . . . .

The Very Short Story 101

So two fiction writers walk into a bar. That’s not the opening line of a joke, that’s just what fiction writers do. They walk into a bar. Now if they haven’t slept with each other yet they might engage in some witty flirting. If they have slept with each other already or are sleeping with a friend of a friend or secretly hate each other or each other’s writing or have written reviews of each other’s work, some awkward editorializing might be required. But basically, two fiction writers walk into a bar, they drink an alarming amount, there’s chemistry or there’s competition, and eventually one will turn to the other and ask: So, who have you been reading lately?

In January 2006 Mike Bryson, editor of the Toronto-based web journal The Danforth Review, asked 27 Canadian writers what curriculum they would bring to class, if they were asked to teach an introductory level course, The Short Story 101. I’ve never taken an introductory level course on the short story let alone taught one, so I don’t know what makes a good curriculum. Not all of the 27 lists listed on TDR read like curriculum. Some seem like maybe they were compiled to impress fiction writers in bars. But maybe that’s just me.

I used to hate to read short stories. Then I found out I write very short stories, which isn’t quite the same. Anyone signing up for “The Very Short Story 101” would probably be better off just reading poetry. Chances are I’ll never be an English teacher, not with that attitude. But the next time I walk into a bar with a fiction writer, here are some of the authors, stories, or groups of stories that I’ll try and squeeze into the conversation:

Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphoses”
Isaac Babel, “Red Calvary”
Gogol, “The Overcoat”
Chekov, “The Kiss”
James Joyce, “The Dead”
Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber”
Haruki Murakami, “The Elephant Vanishes”
Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
Grace Paley, “The Small Disturbances of Man”
Cynthia Ozick, “The Shawl”
Amy Hempel, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried”
Barbara Gowdy, “We so Seldom Look on Love”
Anne Carson, “Short Talks”
Lydia Davis, “Almost No Memory”
Mark Richard, “Strays”
Joy Williams, “Honored Guest”
Ron Carlson, “Towel Season”
Lisa Moore, “Open”
Greg Hollingshead, “The Roaring Girl”

So, who have you been reading lately?
. . . . .

Reading List 2005

More or less in chronological order, here’s what I was reading in 2005.

Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

Aristotle, Poetics

Julian Barnes, England, England

Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

Michel Tremblay, La Grosse Femme d’a cote est Enceinte

Mordecai Richler, The Street

Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

Hesiod, Works & Days

Theocritus, Idylls

Virgil, Eclogues & Georgics

Martialis, Epigrams

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

Vita Sackville-West, Andrew Marvell

Irving Layton, Waiting for the Messiah

Mordecai Richler, Son of a Smaller Hero

Lise Tremblay, Mile End (La Danse Juive)

Mavis Gallant, Accross the Bridge

Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness

Francis Bacon, Essays & Aphorisms

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker

Monique Troung, The Book of Salt

Lydia Davis, Almost no Memory

Ben Okri, Stars of the New Curfew

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Denis Johnson, Fiskadoro

Mary V. Dearborn, Love in the Promised Land:
The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey

Cynthia Ozick, The Pagan Rabbi

Mario Vargas Llosa, Who Killed Palomino Molero

Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

Barry Hannah, Yonder Stands Your Orphan

James Joyce, Dubliners

Nula O’Foalain, Are YOu Somebody?

Knut Hamsun, The Growth of the Soil

David Mamet, The Village

Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders

Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House

John Hawkes, The Beetle Leg

Joy Williams, Honoured Guest

Sherwin Tjia, The World is a Hearbreaker

Grace Paley, Just as I Thought

Barry Yourgrau, Wearing Dad’s Head

Lawerence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind

Sheila Heti, Ticknor

Bohuml Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

Josip Novakovich, Salvation and Other Disasters

Derrida, Writting and Difference

OVID, Tristia & Ex Ponto

Alice McDermott, Child of My Heary

Anais Nin, Under a Glass Bell

Cela, The Family of Pascual Duarte

V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival

Lydia Davis, Samuel Johnson is Indignant

Virginia Woolf, Paper Darts: Illustrated Letters

Marci Denesiuk, The Far Away Home

Djuna Barns, Nightwood

Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living

Mark Richard, Charity

Jon Paul Fiorentino,Asthmatica

Gogol, The Overcoat

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

Anne-Marie MacDonald, As the Crow Flies

Amy Hempel, The Dog of the Marriage

OVID, The Metamorphoses

Zadie Smith White Teeth

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Margurette Yourcenar, A Coin in Nine Hands

Ron Carlson, At the Jim Bridger

. . . . .

Reading Sharon Olds

The Eye

My bad grandfather wouldn’t feed us.
He turned the lights out when we tried to read.
He sat alone in the invisible room
in front of the hearth, and drank. He died
when I was seven, and Grandma had never once
taken anyone’s side against him,
the firelight on his red cold face
reflecting extra on his glass eye.
Today I thought about that glass eye,
and how at night in the big double bed
he slept facing his wife, and how the limp
hole, where his eye had been, was open
towards her on the pillow, and how I am
one-fourth him, a brutal man with a
hole for an eye, and one-fourth her,
a woman who protected no one. I am their
sex, too, their son, their bed, and
under their bed the trap-door to the
cellar, with its barrels of fresh apples, and
somewhere in me too is the path
down to the creek gleaming in the dark, a
way out of there.

Sharon Olds, from The Dead and the Living

. . . . .

Reading Anne-Marie MacDonald

“If you move around all your life, you can’t find where you come from on a map. All those places where you lived are just that: places. You don’t come from any of them; you come from a series of events. And those are mapped in memory. Contingent, precarious events, without the counterpane of place to muffle the knowledge of how unlikely we are. Almost not born at every turn. Without a place, events slow-tumbling through time become your roots. Stories shading into one another. You come from a plane crash. From a war that brought your parents together.”
Anne-Marie MacDonald, As The Crow Flies, Toronto: Knopf, 2003. page 36.
. . . . .

Still Reading Rilke

Rilke says:
“Do not let yourself be misled by outward appearances; in the depths everything becomes law.”
From “Letters to a Young Poet” July 16th 1903.
. . . . .

Still reading Ovid

Ovid turns many men to birds and beasts.
But mostly women, it seems, make like trees and leave.

Daphne, fleeing Phoebus, wind flowing in her dress,
“Called ‘Father, if your waters still hold charms
to save your daughter, cover with green earth
This body I wear too well,” and as she spoke
A soaring drowsiness possessed her; growing
In earth she stood, which thighs embraced by climbing
Bark, her white arms branches, her fair head swaying
In a cloud of leaves; all that was Daphne bowed
In the stirring of the wind, the glittering green
Leaf twined within her hair and she was laurel.”

Dryope did not ask for her tree-grown prison.
She picked a bright lotus at the stilled edges of a lake.
A cursed flower, the body of another chased woman,
Lotis, who turned to plant to escape naughty Priapus.
Dryope turned to run, but “her feet were caught,
Held into earth and grass, and as she swayed,
Only her arms and shoulders were swung free.
Rough bark crept up her legs, her thighs,
And as she felt it creep, she tore her hair,
Only to find her fingers full of leaves.”
A lotus tree her last fair disguise, she pleads:
“Let neither steel nor tooth break though these boughs,
nor senseless cattle eat away my leaves.”

After Orpheus lost Eurydice the second time,
he turned to singing and preferred the love of boys.
“The songs that Orpheus sang brought creatures round him,
All beast, all birds, all stones held in their spell.
But look! There on a hill that overlooked the plain,
A crowd of raging women stood, their naked breasts
Scarce covered by strips of fur. They gazed at Orpheus
Still singing, his frail lyre in one hand.
Her wild hair in the wind, one naked demon cried,
‘Look at the pretty boy who will not have us!’
And shouting tossed a spear aimed at his mouth.”
“The screams of women, clapping of hands on breasts and thighs,
The clattering tympanum soon won their way
Above the poet’s music; spears found their aim,
And stones turned red, streaked by the singer’s blood.”

Guess the punishment for the murder of Orpheus:
Lyaeus captured the Thracian madwomen
“Who saw him die, trussed them with roots,
And thrust their feet, toes downward, into earth.
As birds are trapped by clever fowlers in a net,
Then flutter to get free, drawing the net still tighter
Round wings and claws, so each woman fought,
Held by quick roots entangling feet and fingers,
Toenails in earth, she felt bark creeping up her legs,
And when she tried to slap her thighs, her hands struck oak;
Her neck, her shoulders, breasts were oak-wood carving;
You’d think her arms were branches – you’re not wrong.”
. . . . .

Reading Ovid

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, so many turn to stone,
whether from sadness, fear or retribution.

A solid state was the fate of ruined Niobe:
“Her neck unbending, arms, feet motionless,
Even her entrails had been turned to stone.”

Against Perseus, Eryx disbelieved his men:
“’It is your fear and not the Gorgon’s head
That makes you stand as if you were asleep;
Wake up with me and cut this monster down,
This boy who talks of magic spells and weapons.’
He charged, but as he lunged, floor gripped his feet;
He turned to granite in full battle-dress.”

And Phineus, “whose neck at once grew rigid,
And tears of onyx hung upon his cheeks.”

All this is because, I suppose, in the beginning:

“(Some find this fable more than fabulous,
But we must keep faith with our ancient legends)
Pebbles grew into rocks, rocks into statues
That looked like men; the darker parts still wet
With earth were flesh, dry elements were bones,
And veins began to stir with human blood –
Such were the inclinations of heaven’s will.
The stones that Deucalion dropped were men,
And those that fell from his wife’s hands were women.
Beyond, behind the years of loss and hardship
We trace a stony heritage of being.”

Suffice it to say,
I am careful not to fall asleep while reading Ovid.
. . . . .