Kiss me, the people of my grandparents’ homeland are a bunch of bloodthirsty, uncivilized, testicle-cooking savages.

I didn’t realize until just now the obnoxious appropriateness of spending St. Patrick’s Day reading chronicle histories of Ireland. Why, pray, was I reading chronicle histories of Ireland for a paper about Wales? Ask the Renaissance. Can’t keep its eye on the damn ball.

Which is why I have this gem to give you, courtesy of Meredith Hanmer, doctor in divinity and collector of weird-ass antiquaria. From his Chronicle of Ireland, collected in 1633 with Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland and [Saint] Edmund Campion’s Historie of Ireland.

Dermot Mac Moragh, King of Leinster, was a long time enamoured with the wife of Ororike, King of Meth, some call him Morice, some other Merdich, she was the daughter of Omalarghlun, whom nature had made faire, the world a Queene, and lust a Harlot: the booke of Howth reporteth at large, how Ororic was old, his Queene young and wanton, and that in derision, when he came from hunting, and being an hungred, she gave Apples to eate, which had beene in some undecent place of her body to be spoken of, so that the scent of them was strong, whereat she smiled; her Lord and husband having secretly learned her lewd practise, tooke with him the day following, two of her foster brothers a hunting, gelded them, baked their stones, brought the Pie hot to his Lady and her Gentlewomen, when hee had commended the rarenesse of the meat, the fond wantons and giglets, fell to it, when they had satisfied themselves, saith Ororic, how like you this Pye, excellent good meat say they; it is (saith hee) the meat which you love raw and rosted, what is that (say they) the stones of your two foster brethren; with that she cast up a wilde look, and never beheld him cheerefully againe. [Ed. note: I'll bet!]

Battles, needless to say, ensued. Hanmer’s next narratorial act is to diverge entirely from his story to tell of Madoc, disgruntled third or maybe fourth son of Owain of Gwynedd, who, despairing of wresting his way into the raging succession battle for the rule of Gwynedd, took off across the sea and settled America. Yeah, that’s right. Three hundred years before Columbus. Yeah, Spain — eat it.

Completely irrelevant for Hanmer; sweet sweet term paper fodder for me.

Ahem. For those of you with EEBO* access, the tale can be found here. For those of you without, this is STC 1014:21, sigs. Ii7v-Ii8r. As for Madoc, more on him – perhaps, this time, with gravitas – later.

* Things I will miss about living close to London: “Screw EEBO, man, I’ll just hop on a train and go look at the thing. And at absolutely anything else I want.”

I am so over this shit.

Reader, excuse me for a moment. I am having a fit.

… I MISS MY BOOKS.

As you may be aware, I am currently in the middle of another in a series of temporary living experiences: “home,” whatever that means at this stage, is somewhere in the American Northeast. I, however, am not. I am in a tiny, minimally furnished, undecorated room in the south of England, with only the “necessities” (broadly defined) of an MA student’s life.

I and my books are not in the same place.

This is one of many symptoms of the temporariness of my life here, one that in many ways encapsulates the exilic feeling I have from time to time. My life is unstable, the world I’ve built here clearly defined by its inevitable end, its dissolution, at the end of the summer. I need stability. I need my books.

I miss my Eliot. I miss my Wallace Stevens. I miss my full collections of the works of Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov. I miss my Middlemarch. I miss my mammoth anthologies. I miss my non-book ephemera — my course readers from undergrad, drafts of my thesis with Professor Wry’s handwriting all over them, my course notes and their marginal observations on the state of my brain, my journals dating back to early high school.

After a long day of, largely, drudgery, I need the solace of a well-worn, over-read paperback. I need the Four Quartets, god damn it. There are perhaps three books in my bedroom that are not either products of the Renaissance or keystones of critical theory, and one of them is authored by Anne McCaffrey. My library quota has been filled with books on Shakespeare editorship, early British nationhood, the history of the book, and recusant poetics. Right now, I don’t need any of those things. I need a break from my intellectual world, and this just ain’t cutting it.

More than their content, though, I miss my books. I miss their comforting plenitude, voluminousness, ubiquity. The bedroom I lived in for years in my parents’ house is bursting with books. They, not the studs and drywall and insulation and wooden siding, are what sheltered me from the violences of the outside world. They are, in many ways, my home.

I have always thought of the true moment of growing up, the genuine moving-on, the real “on my own,” as being the moment when I move into a place and take all of my books with me. I will do this in September. I want it now.

I need something vaguely resembling stable domesticity. I need to go to a place, stay there for years, make it my own. And I need my fucking books.

What is a book?

Okay, enough of this depressing post at the head of my blog. Because, as my friend the Puffin notes, this work matters very much indeed.

Some of you may have twigged to the fact that I’m a little addle-brainedly obsessed with books. For the nonce, I am particularly obsessed with one particular book, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what it’s doing or how to write about it.

I have written before about my tendency to get mired in Big Questions, usually a tremendous problem, especially for a wee little ‘phyte like me. However, this time my big question is devilishly simple and beguilingly pretty, so I am going to indulge myself, and ask you to enable my self-indulgence. Posing questions on this blog has gone well once before, so I ask another:

What is a book?

No, really. What is a book? What do books do? How different are they from script, and why does this difference matter? What do books mean to you? Why do you spend time with books? Why do we sit idly by at the movies and watch thousands of human beings get mown down, while (pace Dance) if we catch so much as a whiff of a burning book, our hearts break and we begin to wail and gnash our teeth?

This question is more rife for the earlies and medievalists out there, and brings back that other big question about the past and its alterity, and what we can learn from it. My attitudes about books have certainly changed dramatically since I started playing with very old ones. But I want to hear from everyone.

Really. What is a book?

So, so spoiled.

Reader, your mouse has hit a low point after a really splendid week. She’s sick and snuffly and unable to deal with anything remotely challenging or intellectual. She needs a hug.

So imagine her joy when, during a long phone call (mostly consisting of said mouse whining about said illness), her father lets slip that he has got her the perfect Christmas present.

Oh, reader! There is nothing, nothing like a Pléiade. I have never owned one. I have fondled many. It will be difficult to choose between reading it and just coddling it, nuzzling it, smooshing my face into it. And Montaigne… oh, reader.

The word, I believe, is “bibliogasm.”

Memeface

I have been tagged by everyone and then some for the “Seven Random Things” meme. As I have already done not one but two bits-and-pieces sorts of meme, I’m going to take this one in a new direction. Because I am a neophyte, and because this blog is becoming more and more a learning space, I am abandoning the rules and the tagging, and instead am going to write seven questions for my readers. I hope you will post responses to any one or several of them either in comments, or if you are insanely inspired, in posts of your own.

1. For those of you working in early periods: So. How do you feel about the Past? What does it mean to you to encounter things that are old? Do you fall on a particular side of the irreparable-alterity/abiding-familiarity debate? Do you think that debate is nonsense? Especially if you work on something not obviously, blatantly political: how do you think about the political value of what you do? When did you first discover History? What drew you to it?

2. For those of you to whom work in archives and rare book / manuscript collections is central: recall your first experience of these spaces and these materials. What was it like? What did you learn? If, from where you stand now, you could communicate something to the You who first encountered these things, what would it be?

3. For those of you who are interested in performance, or who are yourselves performers: how do you relate performance to your academic lives? Has your thinking about performance shaped or changed the way you conceive of yourself as a scholar? There are obvious links between performance and teaching, but less talked about are the links between performance and participation in academic communities outside the classroom, and especially undiscussed is the relationship of the activity of performance to research and writing. Thoughts?

4. Who (or what) was the object of your first intellectual crush? Do you stand by that adoration today, or are you still trying to find a way to erase that moment from history?

5. Adjunct Whore gets an opt-out on this one, since I’ve already asked her, but for the rest of you: is there a famous text, school of thought, theory, that is extremely hip in or vital to your field, that you are Expected to Know, but that you, to your shame and/or puzzlement, haven’t read, don’t understand, are completely unimpressed with, or simply fear? Of course there is. What is it?

6. If you could change, radically change, one major thing about your field, what would it be, and why?

7. Tell me about your marginalia. (This sounds like a come-on, and I like it that way.) What do you write in books? If your notes were in an alphabet that I don’t read, what sort of shapes would I see framing the pages? Do you prefer symbolic diagrams (arrows, tick-marks, underlining, etc) or verbal notes? Would anyone who is not you understand them? Are they fully integrated with the text they limn, or could they stand alone?

Inquiring minds want to know. (Inquiring minds also want to procrastinate — help a girl out here.)

In which mouse is falling inexplicably in love with pre-war criticism and edition

You will recall that this summer, in Utah of all places, I purchased J. E. Spingarn’s three-volume anthology of seventeenth-century “literary criticism” (cute, huh?), printed at Oxford’s Clarendon Press in 1908. It happened to be a first edition, in not-great shape by the book trade’s standards, which means excellent shape by my standards.

Last week, Brit Uni’s library sold off all its old slough, which means I acquired, among other beautiful things, the second volume of W. P. Ker’s edition of Dryden’s essays (Clarendon, 1900 — another first edition), as well as the first volume of G. Gregory Smith’s anthology of Elizabethan “critical essays” (also cute, Clarendon, 1904 — yep, first edition). Oh, and they were two quid each.

Three points make a collection, as far as I’m concerned.

So I set out to retrieve the other halves of both two-volume works. I secured the Dryden quickly and with no trouble (for slightly more than two quid…), but no one seems to be selling the Smith volumes independently of one another. Oh well, I thought, fun project.

By “fun project,” I mean “excuse to procrastinate.” Some people have Facebook or MySpace, others have more news sources than can possibly be healthy. I now have Abe Books. And a really strange little budding collection.

In conclusion, I never thought I’d say this, but I’ve been salivating over four full volumes of E. K. Chambers.

And other Unmentionables. Why, for example, do I have such a crush on Evelyn Simpson? I have such a crush on Evelyn Simpson.

More on the selection, edition, and criticism itself perhaps later, when I’m not blogging recklessly on no coffee. In the interim, take up a collection and buy me a present!

A desire to speak with the dead: fulfilled.

On my last day in Salt Lake City, Meerkat, Little Radical Sister and I hied ourselves down to Temple Square to check out the Tabernacle. The Tabernacle was closed (some big Mormon pooh-bah died and it’s like a big deal and stuff), so we didn’t get to hear a pin drop or wonder what it would be like to sing in such a place or any of that. We bopped around the square (with our shoulders bared, quel scandal) and gaped at the Temple (we’re not allowed in, heathens that we are, we’d besmirch the hell out of it), and wandered into the visitors’ center.

After a few minutes of being proselytized at, inspecting waxy statues of brawny nineteenth century Mormon dudes, and watching videos of the President of the LDS Church talk about the sanctity of family (gulp!), we were quaking in our little Angry Queer Boots. So off we went to our second major destination of the day: Sam Weller’s Zion Bookstore, est. 1929.

And let me tell you, was that ever a redemptive experience. Now, if you know me at all, reader, you know that all you need do is say the words “new used and rare” in the same sentence with “books,” and preferably also “extensive,” and in no time flat you’ll have me at your side for an expedition.

My purchases? The first American edition of Virginia Woolf’s essays posthumously collected by Leonard Woolf as The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, and J. E. Spingarn’s three-volume Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1909). Now, I waffled a bit between Ker’s two-volume Dryden and Spingarn’s ponderous tomes — I’m only really interested in the first volume of Spingarn, and it was more expensive. The clincher was the copious annotation I glimpsed in the margins of the Spingarn. Done and done.

I purchased a pretty burlap Sam Weller tote bag, in which I gently placed my new and also old books, and we headed home. A very expressive baby played with blocks on the floor in the living room, various Radical family members lounged on the couches groaning about the heat (hello, 103 degrees), and I settled in to play with my new toys. I read Woolf’s “Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car,” and flipped back to read the introductory note, which made me smile as I read in its tone its author’s identity. I dwelled for a while on the image of a bereaved Leonard poring through his dead wife’s papers, pulling together these drafts and fragments, feeling her, perhaps, through her notes and redactions, admiring them, pausing now and then to smile with his printer’s hand on her pages, hoping he was doing the right thing in wishing to publish them.

Then I put down the Woolf volume and picked up Volume 1 of Spingarn. A “Kathleen A. W. Jepps” has inscribed her name in all three volumes. In the bottom left of the first page of Vol. 1 is handwritten “Oxford 1928.” Gleeful at the whole person that a name, a place, and a date had brought into view, I merrily skipped forth to examine this former owner’s notes. They are written in a miniscule, precise hand of a sort that has become very rare. The capital F is bold and smacks of Continental pretensions, while m’s and n’s and w’s are all but indistinguishable. Like any urgent student-scrawl (if vastly more legible), these notes come variously in blue or black ink or in pencil; many are merely reference points for their taker’s eye to catch on later perusal; some pages are wholly note-free while others are limned with arabesques of ideas, connections, cross-references and arrows — the maps of thought. She sometimes underlines, sometimes check-marks, sometimes brackets what she notices. She is, in other words, hasty but eager, slapdash but wholly engaged.

I turn randomly to page 33, the middle of Jonson’s “Timber, or Discoveries,” where the only mark is a line running beneath “For rules are ever of lesse force and valew than experiments.” A particularly nasty passage from Jonson on Marlowe earns “?? personal grudge??” Kathleen A. W. Jepps reveals herself to be thoughtful, sometimes excitable, sometimes sardonic (on Jonson’s prescriptions for composition: “Modern Freshman Eng instruction !!”), and always thorough. Until we get to the second volume, where I begin to my utter delight to discover (gasp!) uncut pages. “Kathleen, you lazy girl,” I think, smiling as I tsk and tut. Many of the third volume’s pages remain uncut, and I realize that, like me, Kathleen A. W. Jepps was enchanted by the early seventeenth century, idly curious about the Civil War and Restoration periods, and by the end of the century slightly bored and probably falling asleep.

I examine the books’ exteriors, noting that the third volume is considerably more faded than are the first two. This fading likely occurred later in Kathleen’s life, or after the books passed out of her possession, but I prefer to imagine her little room in Oxford, in that room a window, and under that window a bookshelf. Spingarn’s first two volumes nestle up in the shade perhaps against an early Works of Jonson, while the third has fallen on its side in the sun, neglected as it slowly bakes.

I later googled Ms. Jepps, and the only hit confirmed that she completed a degree (or, at least, that she took the examinations for a degree — but I trust the old girl to’ve passed them with the highest distinction) at Lady Margaret Hall in 1930. This further confirms that the hand that elegantly signed her name and the hand that less elegantly inscribed “Oxford 1928″ along with the rest of the notes both belong to the same person.

This is all there is for me to know of this once-young woman, unless I go to Lady Margaret Hall to hunt her down in record books, or scan some archive to find out if she ever married or gave birth or when or how she died. I like knowing her, though, as I do – as an intrepid, wry, young scholar whom I may partially invent. I like to imagine her shouldering her way boldly through her Oxford (and Woolf’s Oxford – one wonders whether Kathleen A. W. Jepps ever read A Room of One’s Own, or, better, Three Guineas), the bookishly beautiful, slightly awkward, somewhat Irish rebel girl who dared to learn.

What I like most is knowing that as I make my own way through Jonson, Drayton, Milton, Webster, as I smile in recognition or screw my eyebrows up in puzzlement, I will have by my side Kathleen A. W. Jepps or her ghost, smiling or puzzled, at times abandoning me on an expansive page, at times mapping for me what I’ve failed to notice. Sometimes, perhaps, we’ll fight. Sometimes I’ll call her a fool and snort triumphantly that she’s dead and can’t snort back. But I like her, as I’ve never liked a previous owner of any of my books, and I’ll be glad to have her with me.

I work in a Bookstore (and really, really love it), v. 5

I used to think that the ultimate, perhaps only, proper trope of the bookish life was a gleaming, wood-panelled, gold-lampshaded Victorian reading room, in which a slight young woman sits at a heavy antique table (on which she has irreverently kicked up her cowboy-booted feet) poring one by one through heavy, dust-smelling leather-bound volumes.

Reader, I stand corrected.

I grant that there is less palpable romance stitched into the bookish world of my duties at New Eden Books, that many of the volumes on our shelves range from the uninspiring to the flat-out revolting, and that the bottom-line commercialness of the whole enterprise can be on occasion despair-inducing. However.

You may have noticed that I am fascinated by the materiality of books. I mean this in the simplest, most spare of senses — there is something enormously satisfying about their clunky object-ness, about their corners digging into my arms, my belly, my breasts, as I haul them around, about the way they shed little paper-motes all over my jeans, the clean chemical smell of a fresh, unopened volume, the soft, dry sound they make as they settle in against each other when I array them on a shelf. Most of my days at NEB are shaped by the moving of books – shelving, arranging, displaying, re-arranging, tidying, fetching, replacing, adjusting, hunting down and catching-as-they-fall of books. This constant movement, and the attendant sense of the overwhelming materiality of these allegedly highly immaterial objects, is perhaps my favorite aspect of my work.

In some ways, selling books, making the commercial enterprise function as it should, entirely relies on developing a sense of a book’s object-ness, on learning to relate to books as material beings and learning how to coax out of this basic materiality a saleable product that is more than the sum of its parts.

To depart for a moment from the abstract: the other day I put myself in charge of fixing a problem section. We had moved Classics out of its weird hidey-hole behind the register into a new home befitting the stature of Silas Marner, Leo Bloom, and the Wife of Bath. The satisfaction of this move, from a commercial standpoint, derived mostly from the splendid loveliness of black spines and elegantly designed covers arranged as they should be, with room enough to show themselves off, get themselves adopted into new homes, and to grow. But what left me feeling immensely delighted was the quick efficiency with which Boss Lady and I had muscled new shelves into place, rapidly reshelved the hundred or so volumes that constitute the section, our fingers moving quickly to face out Tess or Joseph Conrad, our shoulders tensing as we reached to straighten Austen or bent to shuffle Wharton and Wordsworth. Books and bodies, discrete material beings, find a kind of interchange in these moments that I find intensely pleasurable.

So there Classics was, all arrayed, and now we had this gap on the side of the unit whose front side housed an amalgam of Reference and meta-books (reading and writing, books about books, miscellanies, a small smattering of theory, and so on). Cheerily tired, we left it for later. The next morning, I decided to make this small problem my own and fix it. I pulled out of Reference all the meta-books that didn’t belong there, arranged them newly by category, and replaced them on the ex-Classics shelves. I pulled Essays out from where they languished with Short Stories in the back, and nestled them in under Meta-Books. A lovely complete Didion found a home displayed atop the unit alongside an illustrated Walden and Maira Kalman’s delightful reinvention of Strunk and White. Chomsky on language got a faceout, as did Anne Lamott’s beautiful treatise of advice to writers. Back in the reference section, The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge spooned with Bartlett and propped up 1001 Books To Read Before You Die. Roget got arranged according to size, and a shelf was moved to accommodate world atlases that had previously slumbered on their backs.

This small project finished, I sat on the floor to admire it, and felt deeply connected to the humming life of our little store. We’ve since started selling a lot more reference books, and people stop more frequently to peruse the style guides. The simple gestures of connection between a bookseller and her books, the physical interaction between body and object, made meaningful by what those objects signify and the ideas it is their job to present, begin to translate into successful commerce. This rhythm reproduces itself on an hourly basis at New Eden Books, and I have come to find it deeply satisfying.

Life as bibliography

Being a retrospective on the past three months and more of the Life of Mouse, in the form of a reading list. Not an exhaustive list, but a list. I am still, after an entire year of it, completely floored by my freedom to read whatever I please, when I please, and to do so for absolutely no reason at all.

+ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
+ Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

A wonderful woman at the wonderful English-language bookstore in Toulouse sold these to me. They were both read between Toulouse and New York, during a period vaguely defined in various time zones and zones of atemporality as “March 23.” On the curb outside my apartment, waiting for the taxi that didn’t want to show. In the terminal at Blagnac, waiting for my flight to Frankfurt, drinking my very last French Cappucino From One Of Those French Coffee Machines That Serve Abominable Coffee But Which Have Irreversibly Corrupted Me And Won My Eternal Devotion. On the little flight to Frankfurt, where I sat next to the most beautiful red-haired girl I’ve ever seen (she was reading Hannah Arendt in German, and drank tea). In the hilarious Goethe Bar at the Frankfurt airport. (Note that one of the many pluses to flying Lufthansa is that their hubs have amazing beer in their bars. Also thrice-life-sized foam statues of Romantic poets.) At the gate, in between being distracted by Lesbian Mommies and by the American girl with the violin (instantly romanticized) being harrassed by the German guard. On that eight-hour flight, with the two hippie boys behind me and my heart beating a mile a minute. Wonderful circumstances in which to read two fantastical novels by two wonderfully playful authors. I didn’t really love either of them, but that trip’s surreality coats them and enhances my memory of them.

+ Marguerite Yourcenar, Souvenirs pieux

The first segment of Le labyrinthe du monde, purchased at my favorite bookstore in Paris one week before leaving France. Transported carefully from Paris to Toulouse, from Toulouse to New Eden. Frequently coddled and admired prior to actual reading. One of the more beautiful, simply beautiful, books I own. If you, like me, are a Francophone bibliophile, you know what I mean about Gallimard editions. It cost a lot of money, and I didn’t really have room to transport it, and it’s quite heavy so it oughtn’t to’ve come with me in my carry-on, but I had to have it and it had to be with me. Associated irrevocably with a certain chance encounter. Read primarily at the Starbucks in New Eden, my favorite venue for exhibitionism. Encouraged, in this case, by my desire to broadcast my Francophonia and to invite encounters with other Francophones. A language is a terrible thing to miss.

+ Diana E. Henderson, Collaborations With the Past

Acquired (free!) at the “conference” at which I presented a wacky but much-loved (by me) paper on the work of a poet I love, mostly in spite of myself. When I arrived at JFK in that vaguely-defined day in late March, I almost breathed a sigh of relief, just almost. But sitting down to work out that paper, to wrest something from its original inchoate madness that I thought and think was worth salvaging, that was the homecoming I’d been looking forward to. And so Henderson’s book is bound up in that homecoming. Its conceptual framework is neat, too, as is Henderson’s unbelievable ability to convey critical nuance in plainspeakin’ English that just about anyone could read and understand.

+ Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I’ve been reading this for about a month, and am still only two-thirds of the way through. This is because this is one of the most marvellous things I’ve ever read, and I intend to savour it. I pick it up, I put it down, I read stuff in between, I go back and reread, I put it down, I read a few pages… I read a paragraph as I stand behind the New Eden Books register, I read fifty pages flopped upside down on the couch in the living room, I read and reread ten pages on the train into New York… and so on. Arty Friend convinced me that this was the way to read Proust, which got me comfortably reading Proust, and I have now learned that this is the way to read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Oh, and I knew I would like it because it was recommended to me by an advocate of Dr. Charles Kinbote’s.

+ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

Also read largely at Starbucks, for same purposes of exhibitionism mentioned above, only this time those purposes had a much more overt sheen of intellectual pretentions. Okay, okay, I only got a hundred pages in. But that’s better than my previous five-page run. Sometimes novels upset me, because I don’t know how to read them, and sometimes long novels upset me a whole lot. There. I said it. Now let’s get over ourselves and our pretentions to a literary education, damn it, and talk about reading this book. I will do it some day, and I absolutely love everything I’ve read so far. I’m immensely charmed, every time, by Dostoevsky’s pervasive humor. I forget that I am going to find it, and when it smacks me across the face, I just laugh and laugh, a wonderful, astonishing, creative kind of laughter — if slightly dampened by an abiding sensation, the skin-prickling perception of a lingering cloud of Doom and Despair, well, all the better for it. It’s this combination of elation and creeping, mad, cosmic sadness, I think, that tempted me for a while into thinking I could become a Slavist and be happy. (Who knew Ben Jonson would win in a barroom brawl against the Russians?)

+ Philip Roth, The Human Stain

I cannot stand Philip Roth. I had to attempt American Pastoral three times before I could make it through (on the fourth). I thought The Plot Against America was pure kitsch, pedantic, bombastic pomposity. Portnoy’s Complaint, frankly, disgusted me. I am, however, somewhat enjoying Stain. I do have substantive thoughts about this novel, but will say only that I am at the moment utterly flabbergasted by the fact that I know Delphine Roux. Really. A woman of my acquaintance corresponds to her every facet, with only very minor circumstantial differences. I have never encountered such a thing in a novel, and this blew me away. I am now, oddly, much more positively inclined toward the real-life woman in question. Perhaps because I am, somewhat inexplicably, drawn to Delphine Roux. I think this will merit its own post, in connection with some other things I’ve been thinking. In other words, my encounter in a novel with a real, honest-to-god, flesh-and-blood person is inducing unforgiveable vagueness, so let’s move on.

+ Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

The strangest novel I have ever read, or perhaps more simply the strangest experience I have ever had of a novel. Thirty pages in, I had to start over with a pencil in hand. I almost never mark up anything I read unless I’m reading it for a class, for a paper, for research, or in some otherwise vaguely official capacity. I wrote all over Jane Eyre. It totally captivated me, even the weird, displeasing third act. Contributing to all this wonder, perhaps, is the fact that it was the first novel I read upon coming back to the States, and, aside from the airplane interlude, the first novel I had read in English in six months. And the fact that the first time I read it, I was fourteen — which had the effect on second reading of causing what a poet I know refers to as a ‘temporal recursion,’ always an extraordinary experience in reading.

+ William Shakespeare, Cymbeline

I love this play. I love how generically perverse it is. How impossible it is. How Shakespeare deploys in it every trick he’s got in his not-so-immeasurable-after-all pockets. I reread it in preparation for seeing the Cheek by Jowl production at BAM a little more than a month ago. The production disappointed precisely because it failed to capture more than fleetingly the absolute all-out insanity of the text. Broad comedy is just one of many simultaneous generic and theatrical threads at work in the play — Cymbeline is, in a meta sorta way, about generic four-dimensionality. It also happens to be gorgeous, in the sweetly fantastical way in which all of the late plays are gorgeous. Reading it reminded me why I fell head-over-heels in love with the period. Total fucking insanity. In the form of extraordinarily beautiful theatre. I’m telling you, that’s where it’s at.

The genius of its inhabitants, so entirely different from that of other nations…

Internet-enabled bibliophiliac moment of joy of the day:

If you ask Amazon for titles similar to Lonely Planet: Wales, it sends you to a bunch of travel guides on Wales. Oddly enough. And, joy of joys, in amongst these Lonely Planets and Rough Guides and Frommer’s this and that, one finds…

The Oxford edition of Giraldus Cambrensis’ twelfth-century Journey Through Wales and Description of Wales.

Now, I ask you: what the hell could a gal — a gal infatuated with the early formation of Britishness — want with any other guide?