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  • 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

    → 9:52 AM, Jun 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.

    → 2:01 PM, May 31
  • 31

    The Goddesses' Mirror by David Kinsley and Isla Negra by Pablo Neruda

    42:12, 23:44

    → 7:59 AM, May 31
  • 30

    The Music of Failure by Bill Holm and Star Names Their Lore and Meaning by Richard Hinckley Allen

    10:19, 6:7

    → 6:15 AM, May 30
  • 29

    Dust by Joseph Amato and Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction by JD Salinger

    2:19, 22:21

    → 5:15 AM, May 29
  • 28

    The Face of New York by Andreas Feininger and Susan Lyman and The Tulip by Anna Pavord

    45:5, 16:5 Tulips and New Amsterdam. (The NYC book was published in 1954. Absolutely amazing photos.)

    → 6:58 AM, May 28
  • 27

    The Vineland Papers edited by Green, Grenier, and McCaffery and Aion by CG Jung

    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.

    → 9:17 AM, May 27
  • 26

    On Bullshit by Harry Frankfort and Plato's The Republic

    29:19, 55:5 No comment.

    → 6:03 AM, May 26
  • 25

    Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt and The Mathematical Sublime by Mark Scroggins

    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.)

    → 7:11 AM, May 25
  • A blurb by Marjorie Perloff

    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.

    → 7:09 AM, May 25
  • 24

    The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath and Her Name was Lola by Russell Hoban

    28:17, 21:13

    → 6:07 AM, May 24
  • 23

    The Rise of Universities by CH Haskins and Shamanism by Mircea Eliade

    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…)

    → 6:35 AM, May 23
  • 22

    From So Simple a Beginning by Charles Darwin and Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eight Centuries by Ramsay MacMullen

    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.

    → 7:14 AM, May 22
  • 21

    The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots by Calvert Watkins and Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat

    3:4, 64:18

    → 7:51 AM, May 21
  • 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.

    → 5:28 PM, May 20
  • 20

    Bleak House by Charles Dickens and How Nations Behave by Louis Henkin

    30:12
    7:5

    → 6:58 AM, May 20
  • 19

    Tatlin! by Guy Davenport and Brother Cadfael's Penance by Ellis Peters

    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.

    → 8:48 AM, May 19
  • 18

    Black Box by Erin Belieu and The Twentieth Century by Hans Kohn

    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…)

    → 7:32 AM, May 18
  • 17

    The Voyage of the Argo by Apollonius of Rhodes and The Authors' Book by the Macmillan Company

    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.

    → 8:48 AM, May 17
  • 16

    Terpsichore in Sneakers Post-Modern Dance by Sally Barnes and Non-Places an Introduction to Supermodernity by Marc Augé

    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.

    → 9:33 AM, May 16
  • 15

    Ulysses by James Joyce and The Book of Evidence by John Banville

    21:30, 25:20 Two Irish writers in Vintage International editions.

    → 6:48 AM, May 15
  • 14

    Four Essays by Montaigne and The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald

    62:26, 32:20

    → 6:52 AM, May 14
  • 13

    Possession by AS Byatt and Metamorphosis and other Stories by Franz Kafka translated by Michael Hofmann

    1:7, 26:3

    → 7:12 AM, May 13
  • 12

    A Dictionary of Euphemisms and other Doubletalk and Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition 400–1400

    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.

    → 8:08 AM, May 12
  • 11

    The Cantos of Ezra Pound and Angelica Lost and Found by Russell Hoban

    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.

    → 8:22 AM, May 11
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