oedipus' online complexes

thoughts on a year's worth of reading...

well, not many thoughts yet -- more of a partial list of the latest titles i've read... i'm still collecting titles from my list and checking accessible format data, but i thought i'd put up the contents of one of the lists of books i've been reading, compiled from what i periodically entered into the "Last Book Read" field of my "About" page.

The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd [RFBD DT-GR094]

if Captain Kidd was a pirate, he may have been the most inept (and undoubtedly the unluckiest) pirate to ever ply the seas...

Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, by the currently reigning "dean" of american revolutionary studies, Gordon S. Wood...

[with footnotes, etc.: RFBD DT-HS765]

[without footnotes, etc.: NLS RC 62558]

ISBN: 1594200939

a commercial, unabridged, recording of The Body Artist, by Don Delillo, read by Laurie Anderson, who also provided the incidental music...

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, The First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805, by Richard Zacks [RFBD DT-HP609]

Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign, by Stephan Talty (unabridged)

outside of academic works, this history of the establishment of a permanant british presence in the caribbean (the conquest and retention of jamaica being the key to britain's future caribbean prosperity, has perhaps the longest sub-title of any book i've read... i am aware that books have been suffering from "title bloat" for quite some time now -- at least the past 15 years here in the states, but titles today are reaching the point where they will have to be continued on the back cover... ultimately, however, it left me hungry for a copy of Buccaneers of North America, originally published in dutch as De Americaensche Zee-Roovers by alexandre exquemelin, who accompanied morgan on most of his piratical raids, and whom morgan sued for libel after morgan had been knighted by charles II, and appointed lieutenant governor of jamaica... along with Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates and Daniel Defoe's True History of Pyrates, the Buccaneers of North America formed the basis for my mental conception of all things piratical in the western hemisphere...

I Am America (And So Can You!): The Audio Book, by Stephen Colbert (read by SC with guests)

In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation, François Furstenberg RFBD DT-HT474]

one of the best works of american exegesis which i have read in the past decade, a slyly wry account of how Washington became, through the civic texts of high and low culture, to be revered as the father of his nation (and, later, spiritual father of the Confederacy), and most praised for actions he never took and sentiments he never expressed... a strong candidate for the best work regardless-of-subject-matter-or-style which i've read this year

Demon of the Waters: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Whaleship Globe, by Gregory Gibson.

Jefferson's Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind, by Michael Knox Beran

a poetic portrait of Jefferson, as poet-philosopher;

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, by Candice Millard

Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, by Eric Jay Dolin (a VERY disappointing read)

Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in Americ, by Elliot Jaspin

after the quake, by Haruki Murakami

six short stories, all of which are either indirectly or tangentally related to the 1995 Kobe earthquake... oh, and a side note: since i tend not to capitalize that which is traditionally capitalized, a product of using a braille keyboard to input grade 2 braille, where capitalization (and especially the "all caps" sign, which wastes 2 cells and 4 unnecessary keystrokes) was quickly discarded and a habit that still helps me type faster than i would otherwise, Jay Rubin, the translator of after the quake noted that murakami had insisted that the title of the work be printed in all lower case...

The Chronicles of Clovis, by Saki (H.H. Munro) [synthesized speech from plain text]

i don't know if this actually counts towards my total, as this is one of the works i periodically re-read; it can be enjoyed as a meal, or doled out sparingly, like the last of the hallowe'en candy...

Ten Days in a Madhouse, by Nellie Bly

the once scandalous is now ridiculous -- or was it ever thus? a good, quick read, courtesy of the enthusiastic narrator, named Alice

Charlemagne: From the Hammer to the Cross, by Richard Winston (RFB&D book number: TK0856)

although merovingian and carolingian history has always exerted a fascination upon me, starting with my first reading of Einhard's Life of Charlamagne (which i would, eventually, while at university read in the original latin Einhardi Vita Karoli Magni), and was also fortunate enough to have had an early pre-teen encounter with The Life of Charlemagne, penned ca. 883/884 for Charles the Fat by the "The Monk of Saint Gall", both of which i found in an ancient hardcover omnibus edition in a pile of discarded books on a pre-teen bicycle ride, and although i later encountered Heinrich Fichtenau's classic (and if you study in the united states, mandatory) Das karolingische Imperium, or The Carolingian Empire (NLS TC0095), also translated as Life in the Age of Charlemagne, but i had never read a general popular biography of Charlamagne, and so i asked a few academics i know who aren't medievalistss, but who do have to teach surveys of "Post-Roman Europe: Decay and Developments" and the like, and was pointed in the direction of what critics still consider the best non-academic biography of Charlamagne in english, Richard Winston's Charlemagne: From the Hammer to the Cross, first published in 1954... it is an admirable read, painting a very nuanced portrait of the man and his age, based as much on archival source material as on secondary material, a rarity in the realm of popular biography (especially that of the decade that followed WWII ...

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...

yesterday - saturday, march 3, 2007 - i received my monthly "mystery" cassette in the mail: the audio "magazine of the month" from the National Library Service for the Blind & Physically Handicapped (NLS)... my neighbor, who had kindly brought me the mail, remarked that the "magazine of the month" was a little late, as the printed label identified it as "Magazine of the Month, January 2007"....

this news surprised me, for, since it is march, i had been expecting the february issue of the "magazine of the month" - one of only 2 predictably themed magazines of the month, which are otherwise a mystery until opened...

i was even more surprised when - listening to the mystery magazine while making breakfast - it identified itself as the "magazine of the month" for december 2006: "massage" magazine...

granted, choosing a new magazine every month to be recorded for a very varied audience, puts certain restrictions upon the scope of obscure magazines which will enjoy broad enough appeal, yet remain neutral enough so as not to stoke controversy, is a tough task, which makes for a strange and, somethines pleasant, monthly surprise...

(in case you haven't noticed, generalizing from my own experience, the blind are far from averse to criticizing any hand that provides them with a literary life-line)

february's "magazine of the month", as has held true since i first subscribed to the "magazine of the month", is invariably afro-centric, in honor of black history month

the only other predictably-themed monnth is october, whose issue is invariably hispanic-oriented, as october is hispanic heritage month, an anual celebration of which none of my friends of hispanic descent, are aware exists, until i corner them in my apartment (the womb without a view), at a bar or a party, and subject them to a beer-soaked chaos theory concerning the "magazine of the month"...

last year - or was it the year before that? they've all begun to blend together - the october selection was "Modern Latina" which i must admit, was muy picante...

now, i can understand choosing an african-american issues oriented audio magazine during black history month, and a hispanic themed issue during hispanic heritage month, but - and you knew there'd be a but - there are some months, when the choice of magazine seems either downright sadistic or simply leaves one scratching one's head unto the point of drawing blood, wondering who the hell thought i or anyone else would be interested in this?

take, for example, july 2006's selection: "Car & Driver"... that was simply cruel... why? two reasons:

i know a very intelligent blind woman, who didn't have a gestalt image of a car - although she was familiar with cars, their smells, the effects of gravity on the passenger, and, the eternal twin mysteries - where the hell are the window controls, and where the hell is the interior door latch - but until she held one of her son's matchbox cars in her hands did she put all of the dispirate elements with which she had directly come into contact together into a unified whole, rather than the sum of some of its parts...

and what if one had been a real grease monkey slash car jockey in one's pre-blind incarnation? even if the only thing one really misses is the loss of autonomy which the ability to drive endows americans - it's one of our "inalienble rights"; anyway you "look" at it, that's what we in joisey call "rubbing salt into the wounds, before dumping the body in the meadowlands"...

sometimes, the "magazine of the month" strikes eerily, not to mention unnervingly, close to the bone - for instance, how, in november 2006, did they know that i was a crazy cat person, as indicated by the audio copy of "cat fancy" magazine, which - of course - i haven't finished yet, as it isn't as interesting as it sounds...

another recent bizarre entry in the "magazine of the month" sweepstakes was an audio copy of "details" magazine...

to be honest, i must confess that most of the random magazines i am sent, are sorely neglected midway through track 1 or 2 of 4... the same holds true for a few of the magazines i receive from NLS regularly, especially the 3 from which i unsubscribed over five years ago, and from which i regularly attempt to re-unsubscribe periodically, yet which relentlessly continue to come, like the brooms in disney's vision of the "sorcerer's apprentice",..

the one audio magazine which i continue to read religiously and thuroughly, as i had before i became functionally illiterate in 1989, is the "atlantic monthly"... i am eternally grateful not only to NLS, for distributing "the atlantic" in an accessible format, but to "the atlantic" itself, whose parent foundation provides a grant to make production of the audio version possible... which is only "fitting and proper", as helen keller was a sometime contributor to the monthly, which was the only outlet which allowed her to publish her radical socialist and pacifist tracts...

i used to also religiously read the weekly issue of "the new york times book review", but unsubscribed after 7 years, as i found it increasingly depressing that i was building up a huge list of books i must read, but which i probably will never have the opportunity to read...

listening to the "journal français" is my pathetic attempt to keep up with spoken french, rather than let yet another living language follow the path of the dead languages i used to know, and slowly seep from my memory... i suppose it doesn't help that, due to the ridiculously visually-oriented nature of my brain, i once had the gift of quickly obtaining a reading knowledge of languages, and knew how to read in far more languages than i could actually wrap my tongue around...

"eligible patrons" of NLS can subscribe to a rather wide selection of magazines in alternate formats, including an audio version of "sports illustrated", but i've never heard a satisfactory recording of the magazine's annual swimsuit issue...

"playboy" is also available, but only in a braille - but not audio - version, and i know several blind dudes who fancy themselves the only peple in the world who actually read playboy for its articles...

oh, well - at least i have a variety of things to read when i'm on the john, just like a "normal" person...