Last week, I finished the Random Walk through my home library. Let’s review what we’ve learned, explore some underlying ideas, and then I’ll open the floor to questions. (Ha! Me? Answer questions? Are you kidding?)
Chance Operations, Parts 2, 3, and 4
Today was the last day of my Random Walk, and I thought I’d take a minute and describe my process. Randomness, after all, takes a lot of planning.
Chance Operations, Part 1: The Process
Also: starting in June, and for the rest of the summer, this will be a weekend thing.
42:12, 23:44
10:19, 6:7
2:19, 22:21
45:5, 16:5 Tulips and New Amsterdam. (The NYC book was published in 1954. Absolutely amazing photos.)
22:13, 44:6
From a certain angle, this is so me. I could have carefully chosen seven important books for last week’s challenge. But 62 books (two a day all month), picked completely at random, seem to be working just as well at sketching an outline of my identity.
29:19, 55:5 No comment.
17:16 Pronounced Mardu Gorgeous. Such a fun book, and exactly the sort of eccentric thing NYRB is so good at rescuing from obscurity.
16:24 (Click here for a dispeptic divagation on one of the blurbs on the back cover.)
Marjorie Perloff’s blurb on the back cover of The Mathematical Sublime is an inadvertant description of exactly what bothers me about too much contemporary poetics and criticism. Why shouldn’t a critic be able to handle both langpo and formalism? Why does such eclecticism strike Perloff as so remarkably rare? Everyone outside Academia is exuberantly, unapologetically, and often instinctively eclectic.
I agree with her that Mark Scroggins is “unpredictably brilliant and persuasive.” I’m just annoyed because her blurb reminds me that everything she praises him for shouldn’t be so damn unusual. If you’re a cultural critic, you have one job: to range as widely and deeply as possible through human culture and send back reports of your remarkable discoveries. Perloff is praising the window frame when she should be admiring the view. And her blurb implies she doesn’t look out very many windows.
28:17, 21:13
5:13, 42:7
Today’s books represent two lifelong preoccupations of mine. (Because I’m more hedgehog than fox, I actually see them, like yesterday’s books, as aspects of my single lifelong preoccupation…)
33:25, 36:2
I tried commenting on these, but I got talking about dowries, genocide, potlatches, and fire, with stupid phrases like disastrous attempts at self-domestication; girl’s gotta have it; apex scavenger; chimp with a dayplanner… Fuck it. Draw your own connections.
3:4, 64:18
PSA I only just noticed I accidentally posted a Random Walk entry a few days ago without its accompanying text. (They don’t all have commentary, but this one did. Insert eye-roll emoji here.)
Fixed. Here ya go.
30:12
7:5
48:15 Shelf 48 is Davenport Central. (nb and tmi: I’ve done some reshelving since starting my Random Walk, so the contents of Shelf 47 have shifted one cubby to the right.)
31:19 I loved the TV series, but the books really are much better.
11:14 I’ve been a fan of Erin Belieu since her first book, Infanta.
57:5 Should be called “The Twentieth Century So Far,” since it came out in 1949. (Another Macmillan book, which had been lurking quietly for years — and is now the newest member of my towering TBR pile…)
15:47, 61:8 The Authors’ Book was Macmillan’s style book for authors. A history of the company, a summary of the publication process, instructions on how to format a MS, and a glossary of terms. From when my father worked there in the ’50s.
4:22 The world my wife moves in, and what moves her, as choreographer and mover.
19:11 As part of my concentration in college, I studied the impact of public and private spaces on culture. This is about the modern proliferation of spaces that are nothing and nowhere.
21:30, 25:20 Two Irish writers in Vintage International editions.
62:26, 32:20
1:7, 26:3
4:1 Gift from my aunt to my father, who loved dictionaries (and spoke seven languages, the bastard).
5:1 Part of my self-guided tour of Medieval history. During lunch breaks at shitty temp gigs in the ’90s, I’d take the skyway to graze the stacks and surf bibliographies.
28:22 Poor old fool. Bold but deranged scholarship. Such hubris. Tempus tacendi, Nuncle. (O but what an ear!)
32:13 Hoban’s last novel, and one of the few I haven’t read. I’m saving it: there won’t be any new ones, and you can only read something for the first time once.