Year: 2012

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The Western Canon

Our library is almost complete; once our handyman finishes putting in the flooring and does some touch-up work, which he thinks he can pull off in the next two weeks, we can move some furniture down there and get to reading. And maybe writing and recording some more podcasts. But mainly reading.

I plan on moving our dining room table, a solid and non-descript Ikea affair, downstairs to serve as my big-ass desk/work-table. Here’s the bookcase that will be situated right above the center of the table.

A Few of My Favorite Things

I thought I’d put some of the good stuff right in front of me as a reminder of how much I have to learn. Click through the pic for a breakdown of what’s there.

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An Embarrassment (Of riches? Maybe?)

The library downstairs is nearing completion! All that remains is painting the ceiling and the wall under the shelves, and then putting in the floor (I know, that last part could take forever, but hey).

Last month, I got the idea to inaugurate the new library with some special/new books. I’ve noted before that I’m on a bit of an austerity plan this year. I’ve cut back most of my discretionary purchases, let some expenses go, and basically done some evaluating of what makes me happy and what just distracts me.

I decided our new library could use a nice set of A Dance To The Music of Time paperbacks. I was saddened to discover that the U of Chicago press edition of the four-volume set with slipcover isn’t available (I mean, you can find that set on ABEbooks for like $250, but eh), so I settled for the four paperbacks themselves. I ordered them through my local-ish indie bookstore, Well Read, since they offer a decent online special-order discount and I always try to toss some business their way.

I even had them delivered to the store, rather than my home, so I could stop in and look around the store. And look! Here they are! For only $81.01, with shipping and tax!

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(Yes, my wife bought me a pair of greyhound bookends. No, it wasn’t her idea. I actually looked around online trying to find a nice set for the library, but she’s better at that than I am.)

Well, mission accomplished! I found the books I want to celebrate the new library! I can go back to austerity mode!

Or can I . . .?

A day after I picked up these Powell books, I got an e-mail from bookcloseouts.com, a book remainder site. I noticed they had some Arden Third Series editions of Shakespeare in stock, so I checked out my books downstairs and realized that there were a dozen of them that I could order to (nearly) give me a full set of Shakespeare’s plays! And with the remainder discount, it would only cost me $93.72 (shipping, no tax).

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(No, I don’t want everything in a single volume; these need to be portable.)

There’s a reason I didn’t already have most of those histories, since they’re supposed to be lesser plays, but now I have ’em! The book-buying can end!

Well, there is that Roman “mini-curriculum” that Tom May sent me last weekend. But I can pick those up in drips and drabs. In fact, I took a half-day today to celebrate (there’s a lot of that) finishing my big Top Companies issue of my magazine, and stopped at the Barnes & Noble on Rt. 17 to see if any of Mr. May’s suggestions were in the used books section in the back of the store. I found a copy of Horace’s Odes for $2.50 (score!) and then I noticed . . . the first twelve volumes of the original Love & Rockets collections, for a little under $5 each!

Since I promised David Townsend back in June that I’d initiate him into the world of Los Bros. Hernandez (as part of my plot to get comic books on the curriculum at St. John’s College), I decided to grab the whole lot of them, write him a little guide for what’s worth reading and what he can skip, and start him on the roads to Hoppers and Palomar!

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(Yeah, they even had the 3×3 gridded square edition, Love & Rockets X.)

Which is to say, stop me before I book-buy again!

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Let’s Go A-Roman

Since I got back from that Piraeus seminar in Annapolis in early June (part 1 and part 2), I’ve found myself recharged. Now that I’ve wrapped up the Top Companies issue of my magazine, which occupies my June-into-July every year, I feel like I’m ready to get at a lot of reading and writing. While still juggling the podcast, of course.

I thanked both of the tutors who ran the seminar and also asked Tom May for some suggestions for a “mini-curriculum” on the Romans. I’ve always neglected them, and I think it was largely due to my uninformed notion that they were a pastiche or a degradation of classic Greek culture. By extension, I must have assumed that every last member of that world was as decadent as the empire was in its fallen days. I’m not sure how I stumbled across that idea, and why I left it untested for so long. I’m a yutz. Perhaps my enjoyment of Homer made me reticent to even give Virgil a shot.

In fact, when I was out with an old college pal of mine in San Francisco a few months ago, I was actually irked when she mentioned that she’d never been able to get into Homer, but that the Aeneid rocked her world. Keep in mind

  1. I have never read Virgil and have no basis for comparison, and
  2. I’m a 41-year-old man.

WTF, right?

So I began reading the Aeneid on Sunday, and am enjoying the heck out of it. It’s not Homer, but it’s not Homer. It’s Virgil.

Meanwhile, I thought I’d share with you the list that Mr. May e-mailed me, along with his disclaimer:

“I’ll stop here, making no claim that all of the most important works are here, but all of these are seminal and reverberate through the tradition. I led a Graduate Institute preceptorial on Cicero several years ago that was really a delight, thanks to both Cicero and the class; I’d really like to offer one on Ovid, whose Metamorphoses are indispensable for all art and poetry ever after, it seems.”

The only thing I’ve read in that whole list is a bit of Plutarch (I’m still considering doing a Plutarch feature a la my Monday Morning Montaigne series). So I’m gonna get rolling on that Virgil. Aeneas is just bugging out of Troy at the beginning of book 3.

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Podcast: Manga-loids and Steampunks

Virtual Memories – season 2 episode 8
Diana Renn and Paul Di Filippo – Manga-loids and Steampunks

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The July episode of The Virtual Memories Show is ready to go! This time around, you get two interviews for the price of one!

During my June trip to Boston for the BIO annual meeting, I recorded conversations with Diana Renn, a writer who just published her first book, a YA novel called Tokyo Heist, and Paul Di Filippo, a science fiction writer and critic who’s celebrating his 30th year as a freelance writer.

I thought of posting them as two separate podcasts, but it made more sense to have the perspectives of the first-time novelist and the life-time writer in a single episode. Diana has lots to say about working through the novel-writing process and how her history with comic books informs her, while Paul has a ton to say about the current state of science fiction, how he carved out a role in it, what it’s like to be the “King of Steampunk,” the allure of Providence, RI, and whether he’d have taken an assignment for the Before Watchmen series.

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Paul and me

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Credits: This episode’s music is Rewrite from Paul Simon’s recent record So Beautiful or So What? I recorded the intro on a Blue Yeti mic into Audacity, and the conversation with was recorded on a pair of Blue Encore 100 mics, feeding into a Zoom H4N recorder.

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Podcast: Here at the Western World

Virtual Memories – season 2 episode 7
Tom May – Here at the Western World (The Piraeus Tapes II)

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Back-to-back episodes of The Virtual Memories Show! Who’d a’ thunk it?

Around Memorial Day, I took a little vacation to my alma mater, St. John’s College, for a seminar on Flannery O’Connor, and got to interview two of my favorite tutors: David Townsend and Tom May. Because they both had so much to talk about, I decided to split this month’s show into two parts.

St. John's College, Annapolis, MD

This episode contains my conversation with Tom May, the first St. John’s tutor I ever met (that’s him, conducting the freshmen chorus, above). I find Mr. May — sorry, but I can’t get over those Johnnie traditions — fascinating and intensely thoughtful, and I was glad to learn some of his history, how he’s seen the college change during his three decades-plus as a tutor, how we should never read a book for the first time, and and he had to get a note from his priest to read books from the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

It all makes sense here:

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Check out the previous episode, in which tutor David Townsend talks about education and the American project. There are also episodes with tutors Peter Kalkavage (2014) and Eva Brann (2013)!

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!

If you’re interested in seeing some of Annapolis, check out my photoset from that trip:

St. John's College

Credits: This episode’s music is Steely Dan’s Here at the Western World. I recorded the intro on a Blue Yeti mic, and the conversation with was recorded on a pair of Blue Encore 100 mics, feeding into a Zoom H4N recorder. (Also, there’s a Flannery O’Connor pun that I won’t bother to explain.)

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Podcast: My Old School

Virtual Memories – season 2 episode 6
David Townsend – My Old School

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The June episode of The Virtual Memories Show is ready to go! Around Memorial Day, I took a little vacation to my alma mater, St. John’s College, for a seminar on Flannery O’Connor, and got to interview two of my favorite tutors: David Townsend and Tom May.

Because they both had so much to talk about, I decided to split this month’s show into two parts. This episode has my conversation with David Townsend, and it’s a remarkable take on education in America, the nature of good conversation, and the poetry of the Koran (among other topics)!

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Check out the followup episode, in which tutor Tom May talks about a dizzying array of topics. There are also episodes with tutors Peter Kalkavage (2014) and Eva Brann (2013)!

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!

If you’re interested in seeing some of Annapolis, check out my photoset from that trip!

Spa Cove

Credits: This episode’s music is Steely Dan’s My Old School. I recorded the intro on a Blue Yeti mic, and the conversation with was recorded on a pair of Blue Encore 100 mics, feeding into a Zoom H4N recorder.

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More Bookbuys

Waiting for Amy’s train this afternoon (long weekend: woo!), I stopped at the Barnes & Noble on Rt. 17 South in Paramus. That store has a used books section, which also includes reviewers’ copies that are usually marked down half-price from list. There was a 50-75% sale on, so I, um, pillaged.

Used & Reviewers

Here’s what I got, for a grand total of $43:

That last one’s a gag gift for a pal of mine. No, really.

I make no excuses about Born To Be Brad, except to say that it makes my Simon Doonan collection look butch.

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Escape (from) artistry

I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again: “Life is too short for shitty novels.” Years ago, I tried to read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and found myself bored silly. I gave up at the 100-page mark or thereabouts, and said, “If you write a novel about comic books, Jewish immigrants, golems, and escape artistry and you lose me, you’ve seriously fucked up.”

However, a pal of mine mentioned it as a book she came back to and learned to appreciate a lot. Since I’m interviewing her next month for another podcast, I thought I’d give Chabon’s novel another shot. After all, maybe I was just being overly critical way back when; maybe I was jealous that someone else had tackled a bunch of topics that I’d love to have written about.

Alas, no. I made it around 40 pages further this time, nearly a quarter of the way through the novel, before giving up. The writing is still boring; the story structure makes no sense, with its nested flashbacks without triggers for the sake of building a symbol; the characters are uninteresting; the four-page exposition about the early history of comics may have been necessary, but it was a tedious info-dump. The final straw? A mere footnote, an asterisk that led to a 4-line aside.

Why did that push me over the edge? Because it served no purpose that couldn’t have been achieved within the third-person narration. Even if it was meant as an homage to David Foster Wallace, all it did (for me) was demonstrate that Chabon’s writing sucks and his editor was stealing paychecks.

And really, that latter point could be proved simply by looking at the page count: 640 pages! Was it meant to be a Great American Novel or something? How do you write 300 pages longer than, say, The Leopard, but say so much less?

(Don’t get me started on the chapter-long origin story of the superhero that Kavalier & Clay create. A long paragraph in that story begins with the lead character standing at the door of his mentor, then explains exactly why none of the mentor’s entourage would knock on the door, before explaining that the mentor’s mistress is the one who compelled the lead character to knock on the door. Which he was about to do at the beginning of this lengthy parapgraph and gets around to at the end. Mind-bogglingly shitty, cumbersome writing.)

I felt like I was cheating myself every time I read a few pages, like it was some sort of burden. Good thing this one only cost me $2.62.

NOTE: If you’re interested in a good novel about escape artistry, go read Carter Beats the Devil instead. You’ll thank me once you’ve come up for air.