List: Poets Who Wrote Mysteries

1. Jacques Roubaud - "Our Beautiful Heroine"
2. Gertrude Stein - "Blood on the Dining Room Floor"
3. Kenneth Fearing - "The Big Clock"
4. A.A.Milne - "The Red House Mystery"
5. Jack Spicer - "The Tower of Babel"

Special Mention:
Cecil Day Lewis

As It Happens

Freedom is a necessary curse. And for the reader, confoundingly so, for he has to suffer it not only in this world, where what happens must happen, but also in countless others with strange, perhaps unnamable, laws.

List: Writer-Politicians

1. Benjamin Disraeli
2. Andre Malraux
3. Leopold Sedar Senghor
4. Mario Vargas Lhosa
5. Vaclav Havel

Special Mention:
Sir Thomas More

List: Writers behind the Lens

1. Peter Handke
2. Jean Cocteau
3. Alexander Kluge
4. Pier Paolo Pasolini
5. Forough Farrokhzad

Special Mention:
Samuel Beckett

List: Sport-loving Writers

1. Julian Barnes (football)
2. Peter Esterhazy (football)
3. Dag Solstad (football)
4. Robert Coover (baseball)
5. David Foster Wallace (tennis)

Special Mention:
Harold Pinter (cricket)

List: Macaronic Prose Styles

1. Flann O'Brien
2. Thomas Pynchon
3. Raymond Queneau
4. Carlo Emilio Gadda
5. G.V.Desani

Special Mention:
S.J.Perelman

Thought

Thought is not meant to be an emanation, it is material. And with this material we build castles, we build padded cells, we build mazes or gardens with gargoyles... Or else dollhouses (or else dog-kennels), of intricate design.

Over-rated/Under-rated

Blogsurfing lazily as usual, I came upon the inevitable annual book lists. And also something a little different: lists of the most over-rated/under-rated books of the year. I don't see anything special about the year, so at a venture, imagining writers as gladiators...

Thumbs down: Martin Amis, John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Gunter Grass, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Ian McEwan, Derek Walcott, Percy Shelley, Ezra Pound, Charles Reznikoff, Charles Simic, Alain Badiou, Bertrand Russell, Ayn Rand, Robert Bly, Billy Collins, Anthony Hecht, Stephen Spender, Andrew Motion, Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, John Berryman

Thumbs up: Jane Austen, P.G.Wodehouse, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, George Ade, James Branch Cabell, Ambrose Bierce, William Shakespeare, John Webster, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, John Skelton, Christopher Smart, Russell Edson, Frank Kuppner, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Lorine Niedecker, May Swenson, Phyllis Webb, Sandro Penna, Miroslav Holub, Tomas Transtromer, Francis Ponge, Jacques Roubaud, Robert Walser, Leo Perutz, Flann O'Brien, Ronald Firbank, Henry Green, J.L.Carr, R.K.Narayan, Fernando Pessoa, Alexander Mccall Smith, Ruth Rendell, H.C.Bailey, Edmund Crispin, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Laurence Sterne, Lewis Carroll

Opportunism

"I have a suspicion that he's converted to Judaism purely for the jokes."
-- Seinfeld, in "Seinfeld"

And I'm tempted to turn Catholic just for the theology...

List: The Ramifying Sentence

1. Thomas Bernhard
2. Jose Saramago
3. Imre Kertesz
4. Dag Solstad
5. Leonid Tsypkin

Special Mention:
Laszlo Krasznahorkai

One of these writers I have read compulsively; another, I have read but not as deeply as he deserves; a third, I could read at any time but am deterred by lack of knowledge of the source material; a fourth, I sampled briefly but was too intimidated to continue; a fifth, I plan to read, and it's happenstance entirely that I do not own his books; the sixth, I hadn't heard of until a few days back, and hence naturally my desire to read him is the greatest of all.

Loss of Nerve

Language. A place of hope, a paradisal place -

The word, and the dream, and so forth. Bashful absurdity, stop to form its signs.

And what am I reduced to?

What?

For in the end, speaking plainly, speaking one word and then another of a significant matter, we are not flesh and blood, they are not that which matters, not the nerves. We are composed, yes, laugh all you will at this discomfiture, we are made for our nerves. And when they are gone, what, cut connection, lost? Lines. The beginning and the end. The beginning is all there is, yes, and so is the end, the beginning and the end, a quickness lost

A Prophet

"And one of these days we are going to have TV sets which lonely people can talk to and get answers back. Then no one will read anymore."
--Henry Green

"Loving". Love it.

Injunction, or confession, or both

Booklist: Today's finds

1. Anthony Trollope - "The Way We Live Now"
2. Etgar Keret - "The Nimrod Flip-Out"
3. Alain Badiou - "Infinite Thought" (I wonder what John Steel or Saharon Shelah would make of Badiou)
4. Knut Hamsun - "Mysteries"
5. Ismail Kadare - "The Palace of Dreams"

Special mention:
Pierre Klossowski - "Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle" (The fiction of Klossowski, like that of Ronald Firbank, is important precisely because it is so unnecessary. The peculiarity of the experience he describes gives possibility a new meaning.)

Booklist: Favourite Finds

1. Henri Guigonnat - "Daemon in Lithuania"
2. George Herbert - "The Temple", Bodleian manuscript
3. Lewis Carroll - "The Rectory Umbrella"
4. Barbara Worsley-Gough - "Alibi Innings"
5. Gertrude Stein - "Blood on the Dining-Room Floor"

Special Mention:
A.A.Milne - "Once on a Time"

of Fiction

The Slave
---------

He is free to imagine
that he is free.
Is that not a luxury?


(Such sentiments, sweetly logical, are what cause the writer of fiction
to question himself asunder.)