I’m back from my venture-funded hiatus, and I’m currently mulling over the impending “bankruptcy” of my events list — and also deciding which of the things I’ve read over the past few months are worth sharing here.

Here’s a start.  I bought the new New Directions edition of B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates a couple weeks ago and I’m slowly making my very enjoyable way through it.  (Caustic Cover Critic has some good photos here.)

As you may know, this is the famous 1969 novel that consists of 27 unbound chapters, sorted randomly and packaged in a box.  More precisely, as the author says in a note that accompanies the book:

This novel has twenty-seven sections, temporarily held together by a removable wrapper. 

Apart from the first and last sections (which are marked as such) the other twenty-five sections are intended to be read in random order. 

If readers prefer not to accept the random order in which they receive the novel, then they may re-arrange the sections into any other random order before reading.

One more thing to know - the chapters are each numbered uniquely starting with 1.

I decided to re-order the sections, but just a few moments before shuffling them I had a thought:  once I shuffle these chapters, I will no longer be able to restore the original random order of the sections as they were ordered by the author.  Why would I want do that?  Well, I don’t know - maybe I’d like to read that original order after I read my re-ordered version.  At any rate, I realized I was just moments away from losing that original order forever (short of buying a second copy). 

So I took a pencil and marked the chapters from 1 to 27 to reflect the original random order. 

Then I shuffled away and began to read.  

But as soon as I did, I had a second thought - if these chapters ever fall out of order, how would I recreate the book I am now reading?   So I realized that I needed to number the chapters a second time - to reflect my own random order.

Anyhow, just thought I’d let you know, so you don’t lose your original or personal versions of The Unfortunates. 

A final word:  in Jonathan Coe’s 1999 forward to the book, he notes that when the book was published in Hungary, the publisher couldn’t afford the added expense of creating an unbound volume.  And so Johnson added an extra element to his book, which he explained in an introduction:

Another device has occurred to me which goes some little way towards achieving an effect simular to that of the English edition.  Each of the twenty-five sections in between those labelled First and Last has a symbol printed at its head.  And on the last page, all the symbols so used are printed again, but together.  The really interested Hungarian reader is invited to remove the last page (or, of he has been brought up never to defile a book, to trace of copy it in some way) and to cut up and therefore separate the twenty-five symbols.  He or she should then place these symbols in a suitable recepticle, shake them vigorously to ensure they are thoroughly mixed, and then, with the eyes closed, draw them out one after another.  The symbols should then be numbered one to twenty-five in the order they came out.  The receptacle employed is a matter left to the reader: a hat is traditionally used for such drawing of lots in England, though please understand that I would hope that no headgear of a military character might be employed for so literary a purpose.  Many items commonly in domestic use and therefore conveniently to hand suggest themselves: bowls, saucepans, eggboxes, wastebins, cups even; and do not think I would be offended if you selected that old-fashioned, still-to-be-found piece known in English as a po, jerry, or pisspot.

But whatever receptacle the reader uses from which to draw his lots, he ends up with his very own random order corresponding to the twenty-five sections of the book between First and Last.  He now (or after an appropriate interval for refreshment if he is exhausted) proceeds to read the First section, and then refers to his cut-out symbols in order to identify the next section in his own order, and reads that.  And so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, until number twenty-five has been identified and read, whereupon the reader can sigh with relief and read the Last section.

The procedure does, of course, involve a certain amount of clerical and administrative work on the part of the reader.  But the amount is surely not excessive, and the lazy reader may of course proceed in his normal manner and accept the binder’s order.  if he does choose not to join in on the fun in this way that is of course, his inalienable right; but he will, however, be missing an experience not commonly (if at all) to be had; and perhaps the point, too.  Which is also his inalienable right. 

What all Hungarian readers cannot help but miss is the physical feel, disintegrative, frail, of this novel in its original format; the tangible metaphor for the random way the mind works, as I have said. 

I love the tone of this piece, which gives you a flavor of Johnson’s disarming directness and humor.

Now here’s the interesting part (you were looking for this, I know):  at the head of each section of the New Directions edition, you’ll find what I would guess are the symbols from the Hungarian edition.   Look for yourself: 

Symbol-free page from the original 1969 English edition (scroll down)

Same page from the new New Directions edition.

Each section has a unique symbol.  KInd of neat, huh?

Don’t know of you’ve noticed, but the annual Printer’s Row Book Fair takes place this weekend in Chicago, and there’s an unusually fine lineup of writers appearing. I’ve added the most notable ones to my events list at right, but check out the the full events schedule for complete info.

Two events I’m planning to make today: at 2 p.m at the Grace Place Sanctuary, 2nd floor (events map here) there is a panel of international writers including Uwem Akpan, Nam Le, and Rabih Alameddine, hosted by the Trib’s Mary Schmich. At 3pm, novelist and friend-of-GRJ Mark Sarvas participates in a panel with Dana Vachon, author of Mergers & Acquisitions over in the River Room at University Center.  The panel is moderated by Jessica Reaves.

If you haven’t read it, Sarvas’s first novel, called Harry, Revised, is a spendidly funny but also serious and moving portrait of a man left adrift by his wife’s recent death. His decision to finally become the hero of his own life, as David Copperfield would say, has comical consequences for everyone around him, but ultimately reflects the way all of us try to come to terms with the distance between our hopes for ourselves and that very particular and seemingly random person we end up being without necessarily choosing to be. Sigh. And then laugh.

All-knowing, all-seeing Sitemeter tells me that someone arrived at my blog today via Google, using the search string “tidbits about sonnet 73.” They found a place where I mention 73, but no tidbits.

So I thought I’d go find some tidbits and post them.

I looked in Vendler and I looked in Booth. I finally found something, in Berryman:

The sonnets’ glories are not from books, and rather from instinct than from thought. Here is 73, in the original spelling and pointing (one error corrected, one spelling altered for clarity):

That time of yeeare thou maist in me behold,
When yellow leaues, or none, or few doe hange
Vpon those boughes that shake against the could,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where later the sweet birds sang.
In me thou sest the twi-light of such day,
As after Sun-set fadeth in the West,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second selfe that seals vp all in rest.
In me though seest that glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lye,
As the death bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed by that which it was nurrisht by.
This thou perceu’st, which makes thy loue more strong,
To loue that well, which thou must leaue ere long.

The fundamental emotion here is self-pity. Not an attractive emotion. What renders it pathetic, in the good instead of the bad sense, is the sinister diminution of the time concept, quatrain by quatrain. We have first a year, and then the final season of it; then only a day, and the final stretch of it; then just a fire, built for part of a day, and the final minutes of it; then — entirely deprived of life, in prospect, and even more a merely objective “that,” like a third-person corpse! — the poet. The imagery begins and continues as a visual — yellow, sunset, glowing — and one by one these are destroyed; but also in the first quatrain one heard sound, which disappears there; and from the couplet imagery of every kind is excluded, as if the sense were indeed dead, and only abstract, posthumous statement is possible. A year seems short enough; yet ironically the day, and then the fire, makes it in retrospect seem long, and the final immediate triumph of the poet’s imagination is that in the last line about the year, line 4, an immense vista is indeed invoked — that of the desolate monasteries strewn over England, sacked in Harry’s reign, where “late” — not so long ago! a terrible foreglance into the tiny coming times of the poem — the choirs of monks lifted their little and brief voices, in ignorance of what was coming — as the poet would be doing now, except that this poem knows. Instinct is here, after all, a kind of thought. This is one of the best poems in English.

Coverage of of the PEN World Voices festival taking place this weekend in New York, from various friends, associates, and strangers in the blogosphere:

Budd Parr, Levi Asher, Michael Orthofer, James Marcus, and others on MetaxuCafe

Chad Post on Three Percent

Jane Ciabattari on Critical Mass

Regina Weinreich on Gossip Central

Bill Marx on The Arts Fuse

Ron Hogan on GalleyCat

David Haglund on PEN America

Good stuff.  Hope someone covers the Walser event tonight.

Upcoming event at the Cervantes Institute:

Lecture: “The Magic Realism of Gabriel García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude”
15/05/2008

Pedro Sorela belongs to a family of travelers, including a grandfather who led one of the last Spanish expeditions to explore Africa. Sorela possess a wanderlust spirit too, having lived in countries all over the world. He is the author of Aire de Mar en Gádor, Viajes de Niebla, Trampas para Estrellas, and Cuentos Invisibles, all of which have been published by Alfaguara. Sorela has also directed his own plays and he has published numerous essays, experimental journalism (Pasos por la Acera Sombra) and children books (Yo Soy Mayor Que Mi Padre). Sorela teaches writing at Madrid University where he is presently doing a doctorate on the frontiers on writing.

From Stanley Crawford, Petroleum Man (2005):

As for everything else, I throw my hands up in despair.  Dierdre simply does not understand that in a world in which things are accorded their proper respect, people will be forced to simplify their innate complexity and focus much more steadily on the needs and demands of things and machines, a useful discipline and therefore a force for public good.  It is for excellent reasons that mankind has begun to achieve a world in which more and more messy, complex people are attached to this or that machine and required to behave accordingly by pushing buttons, moving mice, pushing pedals and levers, turning wheels, and switching on and off switches of various kinds.  You may now and then see on TV crowds of people rampaging through streets and overturning cars and smashing windows, for which there is a simple explanation: these are people who have failed to find a machine to bond with and who are therefore expressing their resentment against all of the rest of us who have.

From the Poetics mailing list:

Joshua Clover Lecture, Columbia College, 4/28

Esteemed Poet, Cultural Critic, and Senior Writer for the Village Voice Joshua Clover will present a lecture titled  ”Dimensional borders: no not those dimensions,” exploring the connections between film, painting and poetry at 4 pm on Monday April 28 in room 421 of the 33 E. Congress Building, Columbia College Chicago. Clover is the author of two books of poetry, the totality for kids and anno domini, as well as the BFI film studies book The Matrix. A book on music: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About is forthcoming. He is one of our finest poets and critics, as well as being among the smartest and funniest lecturers alive today.

Did I tell you that my recent upgrade to Word Press 2.3.2 has robbed me of my special characters and added all sorts of typographical nonsense as well?  Browse any archive page from mid 2006 and before and you’ll see.  I fixed the most of the more recent pages in the four hours I had set aside for my taxes last Saturday.  This entry alone took me about an hour, starting with finding the right Greek symbols and fighting with Word Press to accept them. Bastards!

I must be in some kind of strange, star-crossed phase of my life.  Last week I was wading in the Andaman Sea and an elephant stepped on my foot. *  (The feeling was strangely familiar.) 

Anyhow, while I slowly repair my blog, I should point Chicago readers to a crazy number of great literary events coming up, starting tomorrow night with the continuing Bookslut Reading Series, feature two (count ‘em) authors who don’t even write in English!  My kind of thing.

For other readers,  you might perhaps be interested in another dose of my recent readings, unfashionable as always:

Exploring Southeast Asia : a Traveller’s History of the Region, Milton Osborne

From Prophecy to Exorcism; the Premisses of Modern German literature, Michael Hamburger

Kim, Rudyard Kipling

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

On the Natural History of Destruction, WG Sebald

A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection, Aimee Liu and Stacy Bierlein (eds.)

Thai Hawker Food, Kenny Yee and Catherine Gordon

Traveller’s Literary Companion to South-east Asia, Alistair Dingwall

Wandering; Notes and Sketches, Hermann Hesse

___________________

* You might argue that there are no elephants in the Andaman Sea, and you are correct, sir.  That is, unless someone brings one with him.

Interesting event in my mailbox today:

Chicago’s Tribute to Grace Paley

Chicago writers, activists and scholars will celebrate the life and work of author Grace Paley, who died at 84 last August. Join Rosellen Brown, Garnett Kilberg Cohen, Kathy Kelly, Eliza Nichols, Peggy Shinner, Sharon Solwitz, Christina Villasenor and S.L. Wisenberg, as they read (briefly!) Paley’s work and remember the short story writer who had perfect pitch, a social conscience and tremendous empathy and humor. Her dialogue, noted the New York Times, managed at once to be surgically spare and almost unimaginably rich.

7 p.m., Thursday, February 21, Women & Children First bookstore, 5233 N. Clark, Chicago.

Saturdays always find me reflecting on the magnificence of Weekend FT’s cultural coverage as compared to the attenuated offerings in the Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition. It has nothing to do with my apparent Anglophilia, or any subconscious associations with the like-colored “peet-section” of my youth. Weekend FT is just better.

There is, however, one saving grace to the WSJWE. I’m not talking about Teachout’s occasional pieces, which appear too infrequently on Saturday for me to count on. (Although there was a good one last Saturday.) I’m talking about Eric Felten’s cocktails column, “How’s Your Drink?”

I’m only moderately interested in cocktails, so I particularly appreciate Felten’s usual ratio of three parts spirits to one part literature. Here are a few literary references from “How’s Your Drink?” over the past year or so:

“There are no more Christmas stories to write,” declares O. Henry at the start of his 1906 Christmas story “Compliments of the Season.” O. Henry sets a somewhat cynical Yuletide scene: “Everywhere the spirit of Christmas was diffusing itself,” he writes. “The banks were refusing loans, the pawn-brokers had doubled their gang of helpers, people bumped your shins on the streets with red sleds, Thomas and Jeremiah bubbled before you on the bars while you waited on one foot.” Thomas and Jeremiah was a jokingly highfalutin name for Tom and Jerry, a frothy, hot drink that was as much a piece of American Christmas iconography as mistletoe and roasting chestnuts. (12/23/06, “A Mug of Holiday Cheer.”)

In 1933, “The year that brought the end of the long drought,” the ever so elegant Del Monte Hotel in California solicited favorite cocktail recipes from many of its famous patrons. Theodore Dreiser contributed a tart drink he called the American Tragedy (gin, grapefruit juice and lemon juice); Ernest Hemingway offered Death in the Afternoon (gin, juice of fresh lemons and limes, creme de menthe and bitters). (12/30/06, “The [Your Name Here]-Tini.”)

“I am Buffalo Bill’s horse.” Thus begins Mark Twain’s “A Horse’s Tale.” And though it is an opening of Ishmael-like import, the book itself proves to be considerably shorter than Melville’s tale of a whale. One of Twain’s last stories, the book wasn’t exactly his most biting work. A sentimental plea for animal rights, it might not have fared well at the hands of a snarky reviewer. But J.B. Kerfoot was not of that breed. Struggling to say something nice about Twain’s book in the Dec. 12, 1907, issue of Life magazine, Kerfoot latched on to an odd, extended metaphor, likening “A Horse’s Tale” to a drink called a Horse’s Neck. (01/06/07, “Horse’s Neck Is Often Soft, Never Silly.”)

The elegance of the Sidecar was put to use by W.H. Auden in 1928’s “Paid on Both Sides.” The poem-play is a mash-up, its energy generated by jarring juxtapositions. So when a couple of bloodlusty killers from the provinces of England’s north step inside for a drink after a murder, the one called Culley ever so politely says, “I’ll have a sidecar, thanks.” (01/27/07, “A Drink’s French Connection.”)

Whether Gin Pahit or Pink Gin, the drink marked one as a navy man or a colonial. In the Maugham story “P. & O.,” a rubber farmer named Gallagher is returning to Galway after 25 years working a Malay plantation. Shipboard, he enjoys a drink with a woman he has just met: “the Irishman ordered a dry Martini for her and a gin pahit for himself. He had lived too long in the East to drink anything else.” When James Bond is passing himself off as an officious personal assistant to Scaramanga in the Ian Fleming novel “The Man With the Golden Gun,” he out-Britishes himself: “Some pink gin,” he tells a barman. “Plenty of bitters.” (02/03/07, “Born of the British Empire.”)

Lafcadio Hearn was a Brit born in Greece who worked as a reporter in the States. He sailed for Japan in 1890, and once there he soon went native. Hearn’s writings on life in Japan were widely published, and one of his letters to a friend gives us a glimpse of what sake was like at the time. “It is extremely deceiving. It looks like lemonade; but it is heavy as sherry,” he wrote. “There is no liquor in the world upon which a man becomes so quickly intoxicated.” (02/10/07, “The Subtle Sorts of Sake.”)

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. And I’m only up to February. Crazy, huh? I often say — after a few drinks — that there is more literary content in the Wall Street Journal cocktails column than there is in a whole month’s worth of the Trib. That’s what I hate about drinking  —  sometimes one sees things too clearly.

Anyhow, back to Felten. Not long ago I was delighted to discover that his columns have been collected in a new book: How’s Your Drink?: Cocktails, Culture, and the Art of Drinking Well. I got special pleasure from noting that the book comes from Surrey Books, an imprint of Chicago-based Agate Publishing. 

Good going, Agate!

I only hope that Felten will eventually unlock the secrets of that insidious Mou-Tai …