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| hao sad hoominz mus b remyndud ob dis troof |
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| Nora Ephron 2010 |
Last night after posting my announcement about entering the Gilmore Girls Reading Challenge I intended to spend the next several hours reading. But first I took a moment to glance through the GG reading list which I have transferred into my WhizFolder ap and then gone through it title by title, changing the font color on those I have read to blue and those I haven't but intend to read to red.
As I scrolled down the list, my eyes fell on Proust's Swann's Way which triggered a string of memories. First of the Gilmore Girls episodes in which Lorelei was dating Rory's teacher, Max who loaned her his copy of Swann's Way. That beautiful dark blue (leather?) with silver embossed designs on the cover and spine had me nearly drooling every time I saw the scenes it appeared in.
And invariably seeing those scenes or remembering them will trigger memories of the copy of Remembrance of Things Past that I once owned. It wasn't as fancy as Max's but it was nicer than most of the books I ever owned. It contained the whole 7 volume Proust novel in one hard covered book that had slate blue cloth boards with a cream spine with the title and author gold embossed on the spine. Instead of a dust jacket to protect it, it had a slate-blue cardboard box which it slid into. It's pages were rough-cut on the edge opposite the spine and very thin. It had a slate-blue ribbon bookmark attached.
I'd acquired it in a used book store on the Oregon coast in the early 90s for around $8. When I was forced to sell it in 2001 I believe I was given between $10 and $15 for it and a few days later while walking past the Santa Clara, California bookstore I'd sold it to I saw it displayed front and center in the window with a hand-printed sticker I couldn't quite read that was either $30, $50, or $80. My heart sank as my slim hope of buying it back if our luck changed soon enough slipped away. Even at $30 I couldn't have justified it unless we won a mega lottery or the company that had just laid Ed off were to suddenly go public and turn his accumulation of stock options into our docking ship.
Obviously neither of those things happened.
Funny thing is. I'd never done much with the book while I owned it but dip into it at random while handling it with awe, reading a paragraph or a page or even just a sentence. I kept intending to settle in and read it but it wasn't a library book and thus had a hard time competing with those tyrannical due dates.
The memory of that book always carries a weight of regret.
So with all those memories and feelings coursing through me, I decided to find out how much it would cost me to replace the book. Not the exact edition. A paperback or two, or seven maybe. My research taught me that the cheapest option would be a two volume paperback costing around $25 total. Getting the seven volumes individually as paperback would cost between $40 and $80 as they averaged $8-11 apiece. But I couldn't really imagine ordering anything without seeing more than an image of the cover. I really didn't want to get mismatched editions. Plus I really needed to see the font to be sure I would even be able to read it.
Then I thought, what about an ebook. And was about to check the usual sources for the cost when I stopped to think that most if not all of the volumes should be in the public domain by now and I headed to Wikipedia to confirm my memory of the dates and in that article I found the link to Adelaide University which offers all seven volumes three ways: read on line, print or ebook download.
I was going to go with the ebook download but I was unsure of the file format and which ap I would be using to read it with. I'm not all that fond of reading pdf files. I prefer reading straight out of a word processor. Which reminded me of my Whiz ap which I use for all note taking, and rough draft writing and which a few times I've copy/pasted the text of public domain books into. I have all of Shakespeare's plays and long poems stored that way for example. One of the benefits is the ability to control font size. Another is being able to color-code with highlighting, link between sections in the file or between other files, and take notes right into the same file and copy/paste the RTF text into other documents for the purpose of quoting.
I can also bookmark where I leave off by inserting a unique piece of text (like the @ you see in the above screenshot) that I can find via the search function tho if I highlight it with a bright color I can usually find it by a slow scroll.
I can also control the size of the window. I can read faster if I have a larger font and short line of text. Because of my RP or tunnel vision, I easily loose my way when scanning long lines of text and I've found the optimal to be a column containing three or four words or around 20 characters in a 12 to 14 point font.
I'm not sure how long it took me to transfer all seven books into the Whiz file. But however long it was, it could have been half that because I made a major oopsie. I was opening the files one chapter at a time and clicking select all then copy then going to the Whiz and pasting. I had all but the final book completed before I noticed that the chapter I'd just pasted was cut off at the end in the middle of a word. I quickly checked all of the chapters I had and found over half of them with the same problem. Turned out that I had been too trigger happy on the mouse and had done the select and copy before the file had finished opening. So I had to redo at lest three-quarters of the chapters.
After I got them all fixed and finished placing the chapters of the last book, I decided to see what Whiz would say about the word count because I'd been reading that it was considered the longest novel ever published with estimates at 1.5 million words. Well, for the English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Stephen Hudson (v.7) Whiz counts it at 1.3 million. And that's including the Adelaide added text at the end of each chapter.
Seventeen non-final chapters contain this in the last lines:
Table of Contents NextThat first line was the navigation links.
Last updated on Tue Jul 14 14:11:03 2009 for eBooks@Adelaide.
This web edition published by:All of the relevant Adelaide branding of their Creative Commons file has been preserved in a separate section (aka topic) of my Whiz file apart from those containing Proust's text so I could go through the seventeen plus seven chapters removing the excess text but I haven't decided whether to go to the trouble just to get a more accurate word count.
eBooks@Adelaide
The University of Adelaide Library
University of Adelaide
South Australia 5005
Table of Contents
Last updated on Tue Jul 14 14:11:04 2009 for eBooks@Adelaide.
Am going to be starting this book immediately after posting. Its due at the library tomorrow. I'm going to read straight through for as much as I can until I finish it or until I need to get ready to go to the library or until my eyes give out. It is 243 pages and they aren't large pages tho the prose is of the sort I'm likely to savor so I can't speed-read.
Why am I just now starting it when it is due tomorrow which must mean I've had it in my possession for a time [three weeks actually] and could get it again eventually?
Good question. Can't answer it. Stubborn maybe. Or don't want to live with the regret and disappointment after sending it back. It's set her beside my computer for the last two weeks and I keep promising myself that just as soon as _______ [fill in the blank] I'll pick it up.
There are 5 people in queue for it and only one copy in the system so if every one of those 5 do what I did, it would be five months before I could hope to see it again.
Yep, Ms Last Minute. That's me. I'm an artiste at procrastination. Also at overcommitment.
Maybe if it were just any old story I could let it go and wait for half a year for another turn. But it is a story that muses upon story telling itself, upon words and their uses in prose and poetry, upon beauty and how we dare to imagine we can create it with our words.... Listen to the author, Nicholson Baker, muse on the writing of this book in the vid below:
David James Duncan father of three, fly fisher, novelist, essayist, speaker, activist, teacher, contemplative, and practitioner of what he calls “direct, small-scale compassion/activism,” was born in Portland, Oregon in 1952 and raised in a working-class east Portland neighborhood in a family in which three generations of ardent Seventh Day Adventists (on his mother's side) preceded him. He attended Adventists services and Sabbath School until age 15 when, finally deemed of age to choose, he bowed out having long before discovered there was more of wonder, grace and God Presence in the burble of a trout stream, a stand of Redwood, a leaping Chinook Salmon, or the wide open sky than in any pulpit or cathedral.
His father introduced him to fly fishing while he was still in elementary and over the years his love for it has deepened into a devotion so deep and a practice so devout it seems identical with religion. Later he would imbue his two novels, The River Why and Brothers K, with the images, metaphors and analogies drawn from fly fishing and intimate connection to waterways.
While in Junior High the loss of his brother (just 17) had a profound affect on Duncan, providing an early and sharp lesson in grief and loss. Awareness of this may have prompted his high school teacher to hand him Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and from that novel he learned the power of story to enlighten and transform, which sparked in him an undying love of the novel. Says Duncan: "This love had nothing to do with desire for fame, money, or even publication. I was simply smitten by the power of the novel to create an atmosphere in which a reader's inner wisdom would sometimes reveal itself, and I yearned to create such atmospheres on paper myself." (David James Duncan from "An Afterward, Twenty Years Later" p296-297)
For the duration of his high school career he read novels voraciously, "an older friend who went off to Stanford University. He started sending me reading lists and books, and my friendship and correspondence with this guy grew so much more interesting than anything in high school that I basically quit studying anything except great novels."(Smokebox Interview)
In the twelve years after graduating from Reynolds High School, he worked as "delivery driver, tenant farmer, factory grunt, lawn mower, Little League baseball umpire, janitor, tree planter, tree pruner, wilderness retreat caretaker, bartender, truck driver, toy-maker, warehouse manager, house painter"(297) and during those same years he also graduated from Portland State University, explored the paths of the inner or contemplative life, visiting Trappist and Buddhist monks, traveling to India, attempting vision quests, read avidly in the wisdom literature of many spiritual traditions, all the while continuing to read and write fiction.
In 1976 he abandoned a 200 page WIP to begin writing The River Why which he started submitting in1980 and which was rejected by over 20 major publishing houses over the next two years (including all the same ones that had rejected Norman Mcclean's A River Runs Through It several year's earlier) before it was picked up by Sierra Club Books in 1982.
Duncan continued to alternate between the Portland area and the Oregon coast for about a decade after the release of The River Why before moving with his wife sculptor/ceramic artist Adrian, and their two daughters, Celia and Ellie, to live on a trout stream at the headwaters of the Columbia/Snake river systems in Lolo, Montana
Duncan has been a sought after teacher and speaker for schools and events. He was the William Kittredge Visiting Writer at the University of Montana for the fall semester of 2002. He gave the Keynote speech for the Extinction Stops Here rally,September 19, 2006. In 2008 he spoke and read from The River Why at Hope College IDS Student/Faculty Retreat. And is scheduled to be Keynote speaker for the Cardinal Virtues Conference at Viterbo University WI, April 15, 2010.
Two of his most passionate concerns have been for the protection of Norman Maclean's river, the Big Blackfoot, in Montana from the river-killing leaching method of gold mining and pressing for removal of the four lower Snake dams which are driving NW Salmon to extinction. For the latter he has teamed up with American Rivers and will be speaking at their NW regional office’s 8th annual dinner and auction in Seattle on March 4 2010.
His essays and stories have appeared in Big Sky Journal, Gray's Sporting Journal, Harper's, Northern Lights, Outside, Orion, The Sun, Sierra, and a myriad of anthologies, forwards for other writers, and other publications.
Duncan told Smokehouse the interviewer in 2004 that he was working on several long fiction projects, a novella collection featuring female protagonists set in the West, a novel with working title Eastern/Western and a second novel, a comedy about reincarnation and human folly he used to call Nijinsky Hosts Saturday Night Live but has since relegated that title to a section of the whole now with working title:
Non-Rhyming, Non-Catholic Western-American-Dialect
Montana-&-New York-Locale
Divine Comedy,
Version 2.
A Novel
I did go to John Daniel's writing workshop this morning. And I did not sleep first. Nor have a slept since. So I've been up since before noon Monday. I would love to go into detail of my eventful day which included a brief conversation with John Daniel after class and then being escorted by a student across campus and across the street to the public library where I spent and hour browsing for books and checking out some sixteen on my sister's card before calling her to come pick me up.
Last night Daniel read from one of his essays in which he likened a river to a story. It was an involved and elaborate extended metaphor. Today as guest speaker in a creative writing professor's class which welcomed the attendance of any John Q. Public, he reversed the extended metaphor, likening a story to a river. And then as he dwelled on the specifics of memoir writing, he asked us to imagine our selves and our lives as rivers before zeroing in on one event to begin writing about.
Later, towards the end, while answering a question from a student about writer's block, he discussed how sometimes what gets labeled writer's block is really that the thing to be written is not ready yet as there is still much work the psyche needs to do in the non-conscious realm before releasing the flow of words. Then he told of how his memoir of the years he cared for his aging, Alzheimer's stricken mother took many years of incubation before it was ready to tell. He spoke of how unnerving it had been to find himself the caregiver of his own mother, the one in authority over her. It was because of this that I got up the nerve to approach him in the hall afterwards in order to thank him and tell him I could so relate as I and my sister have been going through a similar experience right now.
I so hope the Southern Oregon Library System has a copy of Looking After because it is now the one I most want to read.
One thing I learned about myself today is that I love being in a classroom as much as I ever did. I think it is second only to libraries and bookstores as a place I could be in bliss--in my element like a fish in a river.
This evening I went to story hour at the library--the grownups version. It was a reading by author John Daniel for the Northwest Voices program sponsored by The Longview Public Library and Lower Columbia College.
Daniel read snippets from several essays in the just published collection The Far Corner which he carefully noted did not have the word 'essay' anywhere on the front cover or title page because the publishers say it is a death knell for a book since apparently the very word essay sends half the potential readers running for the nearest exit and the other half to sleep. Which is a shame because so much of the best American literature is of this genre. Think Mark Twain, Emerson, Thoreau, Anne Dillard, H.L. Mencken, James Thurber, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Adrienne Rich, Wendell Berry, Joan Didion, David James Duncan..... Oh, I could go on and on and that's just the Americans.
As far as I'm concerned a story is a story whether it is labeled fiction, essay, poem, biography, memoir, myth, play, news, expose, gospel, novel, short, romance, drama, documentary, lyric, limerick, epic, genre, literary, ...or whatever else the literature taxidermists contrive in their endless attempts to keep story in 'its place'. But story is no more containable than a tornado, no more leashable than Coyote the Amer-Indian Trickster figure referenced by Daniel in one of the essays he read from tonight. An essay musing on the meaning of place and whether loyalty to place or rootlessness is the more to be desired.
As I've said here before in other contexts and as I sometimes signature my emails and tag my blog in the social networks: Story is my joy. Which is half the meaning of the title of my blog. The other half referring to the personal journal aspects.
Story is my joy and I don't care what you label it as long as it pulls me out of myself for long breathless and weightless moments and then gives my self back to me a little more whole than it was before, a little more faceted and a little more enlarged like yeast activated dough.
So imagine how thrilled I was when Daniels launched into an essay about the Rogue River in Oregon, the river that gives its name to the valley I live in, using the extended metaphor for the river of 'story'. The river was a teller of stories of everything thing it passed between its headwaters in south eastern Oregon to its outflow into the Pacific at Gold Beach Oregon; it was a story endless and infinite in variation that could be dipped into at any one of its bends.
Whatever else John Daniel is, (poet, memoirist, nature writer) he is a storyteller. There is no higher accolade in my lexicon.
And whether I short myself on sleep or completely deprive myself, it means yet another day of not working on the sweet pea embroidery on Mom's sweater, a project which I managed to give only two two-hour sessions since I started it a week ago tonight. I promised my sister I would finish it before leaving. And I've promised my husband I would do my utmost to return on June 21st. I'm estimating over 50 hours of stitching.A special offer from Joshua Henkin author of Matrimony:
Hi, book blogger friends. I wanted to let you know about a special offer my publisher Vintage is making to book groups. Sign up by midnight September 21 and Vintage will set up a phone chat for your book group with me to discuss MATRIMONY, my NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE novel, which has just come out in paperback. Normally, only five book groups are chosen among the entrants, but I have agreed to talk to all book groups that sign up. Here's the link to do so. http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/read/chat.html . I hope this will be of interest to your own book groups, and also, I'd love it if you'd post about this on your blogs. Thanks in advance.
Best,
Josh
http://www.joshuahenkin.comPRAISE FOR MATRIMONY, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a
National Booksense Pick, and a Borders Original Voices Selection:
"In the tradition of John Cheever and Richard Yates ... a novel about
love, hope, delusion, and the intricate ways in which time's passage
raises us up even as it grinds us down. It's a beautiful book. Here's to
its brilliant future."
--Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of The Hours
"Truly an up-all-night read."
--Adriana Leshko, The Washington Post
"Mr. Henkin writes with a winningly anachronistic absence of
showiness.... This is just a lifelike, likable book populated by three-dimensional
characters who make themselves very much at home on the page."
--Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"Beguiling.... [Henkin write] effortless scenes that float between
past and present. [He creates] an almost personal nostalgia for these
characters."
--Jennifer Egan, The New York Times Book Review
"[A] charming novel ... Henkin keeps you reading with original
characters, witty dialogue and a view that marriage, for all its flaws, is worth the
trouble."
--Tom Fields-Meyer, People
"Radiates the kind of offbeat shoulder-shrugging charm that made Michael
Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh so memorable.... [Matrimony] gets
to you and stays with you."
--Kirkus Reviews
A couple weeks ago for Weekly Geeks #13 assignment, I posted photos sans names of the authors who have influenced my own writing. Today I'm going to repost the photos with the names. I couldn't decide which four of the sixteen to leave off so...sue me. :)
Thirteen (plus three) of the Writers Who Have Most Influenced My Own Writing
Shakespeare
The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It's easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!
Your basic challenge is to post author photos.Below I show the authors of:Using the meme-like list below, post photos of authors in response. Please feel free to skip any you don’t like. You’re also free (encouraged!) to add your own, but if you do that, please be sure to indicate which are yours, so that people can credit you if they use yours.
But don’t put words/names with your photos. Ask your readers to guess your answers! If you have a book to give away, you may want to offer a prize, maybe draw a name from those readers who guess correctly.
1. Photos of your favorite author(s).
2. Photo(s) of the author(s) of the book(s) you’re currently reading.
3. Photo(s) of any author(s) you’ve met in person (even very briefly).
4. A youtube of (an) author(s) you’ve heard speak.
5. Any photo(s) you may have of yourself with an author.
6. A photo of the author of the book you’ve most recently finished.
7. Photos of the hottest author(s)!
Recently Read:
Authors who have most influenced my own writing:
70 Days of Sweat
Epic Kindle Giveaway Jan 11-13 2012
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