oedipus' online complexes

two weeks ago -- due to an involuntary attack of "assal horizontology", as diagnosed by Doctor Nick Riviera -- or is it three weeks, or more, by now? according to this file's datestamp, i began composition on 9 june 2007... in any event, it gave me the time and lack of distractions to not only finish Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, which i had been reading exclusively since february, but was able to also polish off:

1) Stiff: The Extraordinary Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach [unabridged; 7 hours, 59 minutes]

Roach first came to attention as a writer for an online magazine, and it shows; aside from its constant flippant asides, and its nod-and-a-wink approach to the reader, Stiff is an otherwise fascinating book about what happens with donated human cadavers, from anatomy classes, to refresher courses for plastic surgeons, to test crash dummies [the problem with real test crash dummies is that they don't measure the internal bruising that only a cadaver can provide], to contributing to forensic knowledge by rotting in a facility run by the University of Tennessee

2) Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell [7 hours, 19 minutes]

Vowell's study of nineteenth century assassins and the presidents they assassinated -- as always, indiosyncratic, impeccably researched, and insightful

3) Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War, by , by Nathaniel Philbrick [unabridged, 12 hours and 43 minutes]

an excellent, but misleadingly named, historical work, as its subject concerns the affects the impact of the arrival of the Mayflower and the founding of Plymouth Plantation had on indigenous politics and inter-tribal relations. Mayflower is, however, a very precise and thurough recounting of the roots, reasons, and ever-shifting rationales that led to what anglo-americans refer to as King Phillip's War (1675-1676), and the ever-shifting alliances of convenience and necessity that characterized that conflict, rather than the journey of the Mayflower, and the day-to-day lives of the men and women who weathered the first 20 years of settlement at Plymouth Plantation. Instead, Philbrick focuses upon the children of the Mayflower generation, their attempts at the expansion of english settlement, their shifting relationship with the area's indigenous inhabitants, the impact it had on relationships between the area's indigenous inhabitants, and the conscious decision of the second generation of Pilgrims to begin, in earnest, the systematic attempt to exterminate indiginous americans which has characterizes, and still stains, american history

4) In the Wake of Madness: The Murderous Voyage of the Whaleship Sharon, by Joan Druett [unabridged; 6 hours 16 minutes]

the history of the whaler Sharon is one of the strangest maritime stories of the nineteenth or any century, and yet there is almost no popular or collective memory of the extremely strange fate of the USS Sharon. i would have expected a shanty or two to emerge from the incident, but perhaps it cut too close to too many bones at the time...

5) The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain William Kidd, by Richard Zacks [unabridged; 18 hours and 27 minutes]

i have two pirate-obsessed nephews (one who lives part of the year in the Florida Keys, near the Dry Tortugas, and is an avid scuba diver) so i'm boning up on my own piratical knowledge; oh, for a copy of Daniel Defoe's massive, and endlessly entertaining, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, volumes 1 & 2 (1724), which i've only encountered unabridged in libraries (from which, as an historian and bibliophile, i am loathe to steal) and antiquarian bookshops, categorized under the heading: "too expensive and too well secured for your likes"; there is an edited version available from Dover Press and a digitalized image of parts of the book at Google's BookSearch

confession: i read this book in the interim between finishing Against the Day and posting this blogsplat...

and, due to its having clonked me on the head the other day whilst i was attempting to retrieve a pill from underneath the bookshelf next to my bed, i realized that i had read another book earlier this year, before starting in on reading Against the Day from cover to cover: The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America, part of Oxford University Press' Pivitol Moments in American History by Colin G. Calloway [unabridged audio version from Tantor Media], which, i would strongly recommend to anyone, even anyone with absolutely no interest in anglo-american colonial history, not merely because Calloway's style is precise and compelling, but because the outcome of the Treaty of Paris of 1763, which ended the Seven Years' War (what we yanks call the "French and Indian War"), changed forever the course of the early modern empires of England, France and Spain, as well as setting the stage for american claims to all of the land between the Atlantic Ocean and the west bank of the Mississippi, thus ensuring that, from its remote northern sources to the Gulf of Mexico, the mississippi would become an american, and not a spanish, controlled river, thus affecting the fates of six nation-states (great britain, france, portugal, spain, those northernmost north american territories, which would eventually become canada, and the not-quite-naescent united states), as well as that of innumerable indigenous peoples in north america...

so this brings my total so far this year to 18 completed books. (warning: i'm a professionally trained medievalist, not a mathematician!) i'm still part of the way -- or most of the way, in some cases -- through the backlog of books that abutted against Against the Day:

• Julius Ceasar: A Military Biography, by J.F.C. Fuller
• The Roman Way, by Edith Goodwin
• The Chronicles of Clovis, by Saki (HH Munro)
• Many Masks: The Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Brendon Gill (NLS: 27227)
• Fables for the Frivolous, by Guy Wetmore Carry
• The Iraq Study Group Report [unabridged audio edition]
• Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, by James Branch Cabell
• Lincoln's Prose (no editor or compiler listed)

and still intend to read the following, which i have either come across -- or, in the case of NLS books, been randomly sent to me -- since putting every book i was reading on hold in order to read Against the Day straight through without any other literary innterruptions... before succumbing to pynchonia, i had already built up quite a queue of works to read before the year's out, which is ever growing, expanding and evolving... so, here's as current a list of books whose metaphoric covers i have yet to open, but are on my "to read" shelf, listed here in approximate alphabetic order:

1. A Commonwealth of Theives: The Improbable Birth of Australia, by Thomas Keneally [unabridged; 12 hours and 26 minutes]
   • there is a common refrain i've heard from australians (especially from one in particular), that the difference between australia and the united states is that the u.s. was founded by religious fanatics, whilst australia was populated with english convicts... so, it was with relief that i heard the statistics given in A Commonwealth of Theives that, before 1780, there was a vast influx of convicts into the more sparselly populated american colonies... i had always defended the u.s. by pointing out that (a) the first settlement in british north america was very much an economic venture, that (b) at the time of the american revolution, there were more german-language papers in the colony of pennsylvania than english ones; and that (c) the state of georgia was founded precisely as a reformatory, albeit permenant, penal colony, but i had little no idea just how many colonial americans were transplanted english felons
2. Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow [unabridged Harper Audiobook; 11 hours 45 minutes]
3. Does A Frog Have A Soul? And of What Nature Is That Soul, Supposing It to Exist?, by T. H. Huxley (1870)
4. God and the State, by Mihkial Bakunin
   • i've only read God and the State in french translation, and -- several lifetimes ago, whilst an undergraduate at university, in russian, a language in which i was once nearly fluent whilst still in grade school, but which atrophied -- due to a lack of anyone to speak with on a regular basis -- into a reading knowledge, but which was rekindled at university, only to atrophy until i started editing papers by a russian academic, whom i had met [virtually -- we have never met in person] through one of my best friends, a dutchman, whilst the former was a visiting professor at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam only, like a reverse lazarus, to be displaced by all i've learnt about computers since becoming umbilically connected to one...
5. The Language of God, by Francis S. Collins
6. The Map That Changed the World, by one of today's best narrative historians, Simon Winchester
7. The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, The First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805, by Richard Zacks [unabridged; 13 hours, 51 minutes]
8. Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, by Gordon Wood, the reigning dean of eighteenth-century american history [unabridged Penguin Audiobook]
9. Thirteen Moons, by Charles Frazier [unabridged on 13 CDs; approximate running time 10 hours]
   • the latest novel by the winner of the 1997 National Book Award for Literature for Cold Mountain, a work which i have neither read nor witnessed as a movie adaptation... this was a christmas gift...
10. The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler [NLS RC: 57204]
11. A Wild Sheep Chase, by Haruki Murakami [Naxos AudioBooks, unabridged; 9 hours 39 minutes]
12. Ten Days in a Madhouse, by Nellie Bly
13. Death in Venice and Other Tales , by Thomas Mann (translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel) [NLS RC: 60162]

i am a long way from 52...