"I want to live with these objects!"

Never go to sleep on a dragon's hoard.

More books!

At the Columbia UP blog, five of the best books about hoarding.

Catch-up

Have had some extremely good light reading in recent days - I tend to fall behind on logging it when I am in Cayman, it is too relaxing here!

Best of all, Wayne Koestenbaum's My 1980s and Other Essays - it is a super collection in any case, but I am also happy because it includes a couple pieces I've been assigning regularly and it is useful to have them between covers. Also, an amazing piece I hadn't read before about Lana Turner, and a "Play-Doh Poetics" that struck me considerably. (Adam Kirsch didn't like the book as much as I did.)

Warren Ellis, Gun Church (odd and rather haunting - I liked it); Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean: A Memoir (interesting counterpoint to Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding, but enough of these punny names, they are good books and don't need that sort of gimmick!); Erin Kelly, The Burning Air (I didn't believe at all in the characters - like, at all - but it is very readable); and David Mark, The Dark Winter, which is a bit melodramatic (compounded by being narrated in the present tense I think) but otherwise not at all bad.

Closing tabs:

Anne Fernald's reminiscences of John Hollander. Professor Hollander's death has given me much thought about teachers and teaching, and what we get from our teachers and leave behind of ourselves with our students....

The rise of the mini-monograph.

Against "strong" female characters. (Via Jane.)

40 trashy novels that are worth reading. (It is a good list, with considerable overlap to my own version of similar, only I would have less "women's fiction" and more science fiction and fantasy.)

Tim Maly on NSA-proofing your email.

Walton Muyumba on Albert Murray. I hope Paul Devlin does write Murray's biography....

Kipple

Is Jonathan Ames a stunted Grey Gardens bachelor drowning in kipple?

The project

A cautionary tale: inheriting the hoard.

"He was wedded to his sans serifs"

Jon Ronson's fascinating 2004 piece about Stanley Kubrick's collecting practices. (Via Brent, who saw it here.) Almost every sentence is grippingly excerptable, and the piece is full of wonderful phrases too, but here is a bit I especially liked:

"I was just talking to Tony about typefaces," I say to Jan.

"Ah yes," says Jan. "Stanley loved typefaces." Jan pauses. "I tell you what else he loved."

"What?" I ask.

"Stationery," says Jan.

I glance over at the boxes full of letters from people who felt about Kubrick the way Kubrick felt about stationery, and then back to Jan. "His great hobby was stationery," he says. "One time a package arrived with 100 bottles of brown ink. I said to Stanley, 'What are you going to do with all that ink?' He said, 'I was told they were going to discontinue the line, so I bought all the remaining bottles in existence.' Stanley had a tremendous amount of ink." Jan pauses. "He loved stationery, pads, everything like that."

Meat on a bun

Alexis Madrigal on a strange case of hamburger hoarding/

Things of minor note

Closing tabs:

High Gygaxian (via The Dizzies).

Digital collecting at things magazine (I believe the original site link was via L. Lee Lowe; the underlying link to Things Organized Neatly is particularly worthwhile, as a cake theme seems to predominate!).

Light reading around the edges of an especially busy couple of weeks: Patricia McKillip's The Bards of Bone Plain, which I found evocative and engaging but much too reminiscent of the books of hers I endlessly read and reread when I was young, the Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy; a quite mediocre novel by Robert Crais; two novels by Jennifer Crusie on the recommendation of Jo Walton (I preferred Maybe This Time to Faking It); a comfort reread of A Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs (not Victoria Clayton's best novel, but the one that came most readily to hand); and - last but most certainly not least - the second installment of Patrick Rothfuss's series, The Wise Man's Fear. It is not that those Rothfuss installments are the perfect books, but they are so wonderfully readable, I finished this one with a huge sense of loss when I realized how long I am likely to have to wait for the next installment. However I have just started reading a novel that seems to me wonderfully appealing also, so that is some small consolation: more anon!

(Saw a bunch of movies last week too, and a show, but don't know that I feel that need to blog any of it here.)

Subcontinental, uncomplimentary

This Wikipedia entry for English words with uncommon properties will repay further attention at some more leisurely moment. (Prompted by Brent's sending me this link!)

The catalog of things that must get done in the next week and a half is busting my brain! However it is all good, I am very happy to be back in my teaching life and with all sorts of other appealing obligations of a more or less optional kind; only I had better activate my superpowers, I think...

(Among other things I am reading lots of novels as a member of the judging committee for a fiction prize and tantalizingly can't really say anything about them, good or otherwise, until the awards have been given and the prize is over and done with, at which point I don't see why I can't say some good things about the ones I have particularly enjoyed...)

I did read a good book last night that it will not contravene the embargo to mention: Jessie Sholl's Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding. The content is excellent, and I am sure it will find a very wide audience; I did feel that it could have been an essay-length piece of absolute long-lived brilliance, and that something was sacrificed in the writing in order to make it a book-length piece, but it is still a very good book. Two paragraphs I particularly liked:

In June, I'm walking along the Hudson River as I sometimes do, when I notice that my iPod is sounding utterly fantastic. Because of the times I helped my dad test out his new audio gear, I can easily tell the difference between a crap stereo and a good one. And suddenly my iPod sounds as good as one of my dad's best systems.

I take out my earbuds. Did I buy new ones and not remember? They look the same. Besides, I would remember. And my iPod certainly hasn't changed. I put the earbuds back in and switch from the Lemonheads to Outkast. Again, the music sounds excellent. I try Radiohead, the Rolling Stones, PJ Harvey. I'm hearing individual parts to the songs that I haven't noticed, or at least appreciated, before. And these parts are coming together to create a vastly wider spectrum of sound. I continue walking, blown away by what I'm hearing, still baffled as to why. And then I realize: It's the Wellbutrin. I'd become so depressed that everything had gone flat, including music. Now it's round again.

Bonus link to my favorite PJ Harvey song:

"L.M."

Back in Cayman, which means among other good things that I am back in the land of wireless internet! I find myself really discombobulated when I don't have regular email access, especially when I'm still trying to make appointments and see people (it's different on a true vacation); I look forward to a return to regular blogging, too, as it's one of the main ways I keep myself on an even keel....

Yesterday morning I had one more bookstore splurge - I had forgotten to pick up my copy of The Bacchae at my office the day before, so I went to McNally Jackson (plausibly the best bookstore in Manhattan, and only a couple blocks away from where I was staying) and bought a Penguin Euripides but also couldn't resist a few other things: True Grit, which I have been meaning to read for ages, and The Blind Side and also a book that I devoured in mesmerized fascination over the course of the later afternoon and early evening and that I heartily recommend to anyone with an interest in the topic, Randy Frost and Gail Steketee's Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things.

My New York subway reading (mass-market paperback is the convenient size!) was John Twelve Hawks' The Dark River, which I found goofy but which I had almost finished by the time it dawned on me how fed up I had become with it, so I read the last of it anyway (but it is not really my cup of tea - wish I did not waste my time with stuff like this!).

Two much better books occupied my attention during today's travels: Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News? (several major implausibilities, including the fact that multiple characters have the exact same verse-remembering habits and repertoire and the mother's farfetched superpowers, but very enjoyable regardless) and Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (at times I resisted its allure, but it's undoubtedly a remarkably compelling story).

Catching up on old New Yorkers at G.'s place, I liked Ian Frazier's Talk of the Town piece on marginalia in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library:

Nabokov’s handwriting (in English) was small and fluid and precise; in books that he took exception to, such as a translation of “Madame Bovary” by Eleanor Marx Aveling, his correcting marginalia climbed all over the paragraphs like the tendrils of a strangler fig.