'in fact he was carried away by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful--the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality.

cosimo was still at the age when the desire to tell stories makes one want to live more, thinking one has not done enough living to recount, and so off he would go . . . and tell the folk of ombrosa new stories, which originally true, became, as he told them, invented, and from invented, true.'

-- italo calvino, the baron in the trees

an ongoing series:
summer 2005 , 05-06 academic year, summer 2006, 06-07 academic year, summer 2007, 07-08 academic year, summer 2008.

i'll have to come up with a new method of spacing out these lists now that school is over. or just discontinue it, because, well.

Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America – Thomas Fleming [re-read]
Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse [re-read]
Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the Goddess – Tim Ward
Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
The Devils – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism – Mary Daly
Nature – Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers – Henry David Thoreau
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne [re-read]
Billy Budd, Sailor: (An Inside Narrative) – Herman Melville
Bee Season – Myla Goldberg [re-read]
The Cossacks – Leo Tolstoy
The Rainbow Stories – William T. Vollmann [re-read]
Beautiful Losers – Leonard Cohen [re-read]
The Wordy Shipmates – Sarah Vowell
The Rifles – William T. Vollmann
Olinger Stories – John Updike
White Niggers of America – Pierre Valliéres
Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Blue of Noon – Georges Bataille [re-read]
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway [re-read]
Omensetter’s Luck – William H. Gass [re-read]
When Red is Black – Qiu Xiaolong
Continental Drift – Russell Banks
How the Reformation Happened – Hilaire Belloc
Red Azalea – Anchee Min [re-read]
Nana - Émile Zola
More Pricks Than Kicks – Samuel Beckett
Rabbit At Rest – John Updike
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto – Chuck Klosterman
Rabbit Remembered – John Updike
The Kingdom of God is Within You – Leo Tolstoy
Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Children’s Hospital – Chris Adrian
Independent People - Halldór Laxness
I’m Not the Only One – George Galloway [re-read]
The Ice-Shirt – William T. Vollmann
Watch the North Wind Rise – Robert Graves
I Was Told There’d Be Cake: Essays – Sloane Crosley
Dynamics of Faith – Paul Tillich
Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible – Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet [re-read]
Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China’s Peasants – Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao
1984 – George Orwell [re-read]
The Seven Storey Mountain – Thomas Merton
The Torturer’s Apprentice: Stories – John Biguenet
The Complete Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi
Tristan – Gottfried von Strassburg
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The Sorrow of War – Bao Ninh
Naples ’44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy – Norman Lewis
Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut [re-read]
Iodine – Haven Kimmel
Raids on the Unspeakable – Thomas Merton
Le Morte D’Arthur – Thomas Malory
Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race – Stephanie Nolen
The Atom Station – Halldor Laxness
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
The Hour of the Bell – Harry Mark Petrakis
Continental Drift – Russell Banks [re-read]
Idylls of the King – Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Uses of Haiti – Paul Farmer
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys [re-read]
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – Mark Twain
A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway [re-read]
The Once and Future King – T.H. White
Beautiful Losers – Leonard Cohen [re-read]
The Black Jacobins – C.L.R. James
Shepherds of Shadows – Harry Mark Petrakis
The Passion – Jeanette Winterson [re-read]
Liars and Saints – Maile Meloy
A Family Daughter – Maile Meloy
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson – Camille Paglia
Death in Midsummer and Other Stories – Yukio Mishima
Death of a Red Heroine – Qiu Xiaolong
The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920 – Charles and Barbara Jelavich

i have produced, as a product of tedium, narcissism, and guilt at not updating this blog more often, a collection of short utterances (chronologically unkempt) for those too cool (or not cool enough) to follow my doings on twitter. please to enjoy:


@AKGovSarahPalin Sure, remain all smug with those ethics complaint dismissals. Polar bears are organising against you even as we tweet.

Read your Mencius.

#Fringe prediction: Gene comes to terms with his Vicodin abuse, goes to bovine mental hospital.

I also like my history notes because of lines like this: 'PM Deligiannis mobilises Greek army and attacks Ottoman Empire, gets served.'

Does this #tweemyjobs thing have anything to do with working for a revived Sarah Records? If not, I am not interested.

The National Brain Tumor Society almost sounds pro-tumour. I mean, the National Rifle Association isn't a support group for gunshot victims.

Driving behind a truck carrying something called 'Icynene,' kept thinking it said 'Ice-nine.' Kept thinking no, no. This is a bad idea.

World: please cease all usage of the phrase 'rugged individualism.' Thanks!

Lessons learned from Sabrina the Teenage Witch: true beauty is on the inside, be careful what you wish for, 'Russia probably will collapse.'

I can't stand grown men who refer to their friends as 'buddies' and talk about professional wrestling with such...gusto.

Topics covered tonight: Melville's sexuality, pipe wrench fights, the oddity of a barber shop called 'Killy's,' Sylvia Plath, and faeries.

No love for Denise Crosby, Family Guy?

Two minutes of Fox News: an OH NO OBAMA COZYING UP TO CASTRO story and a commercial for Total. This channel exists to scare old people.

I wrote in 'Anti-Zombie Civil Service Brigade' on a survey of what community service I would volunteer for.

I got Laura so into Fringe that when she hears John Noble speaking with his normal accent she calls him 'New Zealand Walter.'

@NicoleCristelli Started looking into pirate schools. We should have started the search a while ago. They want so many extracurriculars.

Comment I made in Arthurian Literature:'Neil Gaiman's "Chivalry" reads like something Steven Millhauser would write if he ran out of ideas.'

In class that Twain book was described as 'a permanent smile burning to death.' You know, like if somebody set the Cheshire Cat on fire.

No one on Jeopardy knew what 'deus vult' means.

Just for the record, I spent the morning quoting Philip Larkin at confused freshmen and musing on an independent Hawaiian queendom.

As Meat Loaf gets older, his resemblance to Neil Young approaches 100%.

Partaking of the devil's ham.

I keep hearing about angry populism. Grand. Let's codify it, harness it, shall we? We need Ignatius Donnelly up in this motherfucker. #AIG

Okay, T.H. White: it's fine that you spell the queen's name as 'Guenever,' but she still can't be 'Jenny' for short. It doesn't work.

As a tribute to Genevieve, I want to bring back the expression 'on the horn' to the workplace.

MySpace became self-aware at 6:36 P.M. today, sending me an e-mail with the subject 'Hey Matt, did you watch The Simpsons last night?'

@NicoleCristelli So, Angkor Wat Barbie? Pretty awesome.

Laura bought a Star Trek action figure (new Spock) which features a creepy severed 'interchangeable Vulcan salute hand.'

I think I would love the Caucasus in the morning.

Bitesize Nicktoon nostalgia: a sad crying clown in an iron lung, Wheezin' Ed, Tommy in the dead letter office, MR. SENSIBLE.

I have rarely cared less about a fictional ship.

Conficker will give your computer Sphaeropsis blight and cause your sister to carouse with botanical illustrators of questionable character.

Apparently buying the coconut chicken product I am about to enjoy implies joining a 'Chicken Revolution.' When do we storm the embassy?

tammy ealom, the quiverfull movement, the poetry of mao zedong, whether gandhi or william penn would win in a fight, clouds that look like asia minor seen from orbit, mary lease, björk (in the same sentence as john donne), the toast of europe, sunsara taylor, sex and international maritime law, medieval proverbs, john vanderslice, the war of the worlds, and green apples.

graduating. it's going to be difficult to get used to this: the rhythms of each year for as far back as i have conscious memory have been determined by the academic year. i resent this and cling to it at the same time. then the current season. forgive my emo moments as i mourn past springs. i guess just that one.

cherry blossoms are out. you know how much i love those. i'll talk about something else:

i got another used book with an interesting inscription, though this time it's actually a piece of paper folded up inside the front cover. sort of an ornamental piece, too, inside this copy of qiu xiaolong's death of a red heroine. it reads, thusly (all spelling errors in the original):

hold fast to dreams
for if dreams flop
life is a boal of rice crispies
without the pop

by Jill
and some somewhat
less well known auther
named
Langston Hughes


Dear Jill, I was on the plain from Punta Cana
and practicing ciligraphy. I couldn't think of any
other poem except yours
love Nancy