TOP SECRET(If you read this please keep it to yourself.)
My Reading Diary
ThursdayI stood atop a 14 story apartment building today in Portland. First thing that came to my mind is spitting. So I did. Pursing my lips, I did a mysterious mouth maneuver to suck the saliva from all crevasses of my mouth, the spittle rolled down my tongue, to gather at one point in front of my teeth. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. I released the spit ball. The droplet hurled out of sight toward the shrubbery at the base of the building and I wiped my mouth. Elijah
thirtytwo feet per sec is com. I took a backward step away from the edge, the lip, the line, the space between life and death.
FridayReading
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan
Potocki. Underlined the word epithet, Plato and his first epithet, ‘divine’. An epithet is something that seems to be given, rather than self appointed.
The rose has played a significant role in Portland's history and inspires one of the city's nicknames. Portland’s epithet is “Portland the City of Roses”.
Rosencrantz, War of Roses, Rose of
Castille, Rows of Cast Steel, parallax. Does reality run parallel with fiction, or does it intersect?
I know people with epithets. Nothing like ‘the weeping philosopher’ given to Heraclitus. This guy I know broke all the rules and gave himself epithets. In 3rd grade it was Rump Roast, in 4
th grade it was T-bone, in 6
th grade it was White Bread, and 8
th grade it was The Flying Dutchman.
SaturdayIt is easy to get lost in
Potocki’s novel as it is in Portland; funny I should be reading it here. The novel feels so antiquated and Portland feels so vibrant. There are stories within stories within stories. Some stories are completed within the story, and other stories are put on hold, and then continued in the next chapter. It is easy to get lost, but it is easy to get found. I suppose either way, you’re meant to be lost and found. Think about the lost and found box: There are never two boxes; the lost and found goes into the same box. As I walked the streets in Portland I kept getting lost and then found, and then lost again,
thirtytwo strides per minute. Powell’s bookstore is the maze within the maze. The store takes up a full city block, three stories high, with a full 2600 sq ft dedicated to literary criticism. Powell’s is more of a vice palace than bookstore. I expected to see David Bowie in spandex at every dead end. “The Wandering Jew’s Story Continued”, and then “The Gypsy Chief’s Story Continued”, and then “Lope
Soarez’s Story Continued”. I can barely hold the novel together in my head because it is a beautiful pastiche where every part adds to the whole for one thousand and one nights. As I navigate Portland, I navigate The Manuscript.
Sunday
I found a dried leaf inside my book on page 437. Perhaps a leaf was in my bag and found its way into the book. How did the leaf get in my bag?
As, in the autumn, leaves
detatch themselves
First one and then the other, till the bough
Sees all its fallen garments on the ground. – Dante,
The Divine Comedy, Inferno
A leaf within leaves of my book. Each leaf, each page is thin and feels dry, easy to tear, like this little leaf. But each leaf of the tree helps make the shade, and each page of the book helps make the story.
MondayFlying home to
Bozeman. Beginning
Orhan Pamuk’s
The Black Book.
Thirtytwo feet per second. Would it be different at this altitude? Lots of empty space up here, good advertising. H.E.L.Y.S.
The first epigraph of the first chapter titled, “The First Time
Galip Saw
Ruya” said, “Never Use epigraphs-they kill the mystery in the work! –
Adli. If that’s how it has to die, go ahead and kill it; then kill the false prophets who sold you on the mystery in the first place! –
Bahti.”
I think I’m going to like this book.
But I like it for much more than the first epigraph, I love it already because of the first chapter title, “The First Time
Galip Saw
Ruya” and I think about the first time Dante saw the girl in the red dress, and the first time
Majnun saw Layla. As I continue to read, it transcends that love story notion of love at first sight. And in true fashion of every reader who cannot leave oneself out of their reading of a text, I cannot help but bring myself and my experiences to the book. I remind myself of someone:
Kinbote. I realize that the more books I read, the self I bring is in constant transformation.
TuesdayThinking about identity today as
The Black Book talks about the identity of the Turkish people. It makes me wonder about my own identity, as my self within all the contexts of this world. Myself as a woman, American, Montanan, a 23-year-old. The self is ever changing, shifting.
“My name means the shape I am – and a good handsome shape it is too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.” – Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking GlassThe shape Samantha I am today might not be the shape Samantha I will be tomorrow. The next week. The next year. The
liminal figure is not only the gatekeeper, but everyone. I am neither one thing nor the other, as a book we read never means one thing or the other. Often it is both, or somewhere in between. Metempsychosis. Met-him-pike-hoses. Metamorphoses.
My soul would sing of metamorphoses.
But since, o gods, you were the source of these bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may
the song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world’s beginning to our day. -
The Metamorphoses of OvidGalip, “We all have a second person buried inside us, a dear friend to whom we whisper to our heart’s content; and some of us even have a third.” I find myself talking to myself all the time. But what if talking to myself, is talking to another self within my self? Is it all just myself? When I was about 5 years old, I would get upset and I would go out to the swing set in our backyard and sing to myself about my troubles. The adults laughed at me.
Wednesday
Three masters gathered around discussing literature and although I do not consider myself a master, I could not help but think of my two girlfriends with whom I meet at the coffee shop three times a week, Penny Lind and Baby. The three musketeers clinking our glasses, or rather sipping our steaming coffee. Three young spry birds barely learned how to fly yet.
And I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff- and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. - Nabokov,
Pale Fire
How our conversation differs from that of
Adli,
Bahti, and
Cemali! But I know, when the skin does not snap into place on the back of our hands like a rubber band, then perhaps our conversation could be in this world, but not of it. Our reflections in the coffee shop windows live on, fly on, in the reflected conversations.
Bahti: The reader is a child who wants to go to the fair.
Cemali: The reader is as ungrateful as a cat.
Adli: If you don’t believe strongly in anything, try to make your readers believe you do.
Cemali: Our teacher and master is Scheherazade; take a leaf from her book. Whenever writing about “real life” you too can intersperse facts with stories ten to fifteen pages long.
Bahti: The lesson rises out of the story, not the other way around.
Shaman: The moral of the story is the story.
ThursdayAnother epigraph: “Must a name mean something?” – Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking GlassThis is Alice’s response to
Humpty.
And I think of Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet says,
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
Does Samantha mean anything?
Gwenath Paltrow named her daughter Apple, a fruit. Frank Zappa’s son is named Moon Unit. What’s that?
Names are part of our language, and when the language of names is unstable, and the meanings are no longer applicable to the named object, language and life get interesting.
Friday
Today as I finished
The Black Book I learned that the framed structure of writing and stories used by
Pamuk deflate the emblematic detective novels by teaching me to look beyond the surface and appreciate the mystery of writing and language that keeps life interesting. “Because nothing is as surprising as life. Except for writing.” Only too true, my diary seems to work both ways, but what happens when life becomes writing and when writing becomes life? When I look in the mirror I’m pretty sure I see my face, Caliban
doesn’t see his. Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?
After closing the novel, finished for now, I gushed to
Ursett, my love, my muse, all about
The Black Book and how much I loved it, and he responded by holding his finger up, muttering “hold up” and searched our book shelves and brought to me,
The New York Trilogy by Paul
Auster. (This is one of the reasons I love
Ursett.) I have read
Travels in the Scriptorium about characters who imprison their author by
Auster. Where is the line between reality and fiction? The more I read, the more I realize there may be no line at all. Reality is fiction. Fiction is reality. Atman is Brahman. Often the things I keep so separate in my mind are one and the same. Like the scared and secular.
In one of the many cults I attend we had a discussion about whether cutting a bathtub in half and placing it over the Virgin Mary as a bathtub Madonna, bathtub shrine, or lawn shrine made the bathtub holy/sacred or if it was still a bathtub. I argued for the view that it was still just a bathtub; however I think I have changed my mind. I guess that is what reading can do, change you. But no, perhaps the reader is like a book, I change with each reading. Each book changes with each reading, but the words stay the same. In fact I am not changed, but I am changed. Do I contradict myself? Well then I contradict myself. I am vast and contain multitudes.
Saturday
As suggested I started reading
The New York Trilogy. And this seems like a coincidence, but not. It is written, “Not only is an umbrella a thing, it is a thing that performs a function-in other words, expresses the will of man. When you stop to think of it, every object is similar to the umbrella, in that it serves a function. A pencil is for writing, a shoe is for wearing, a car is for driving. Now, my question is this. What happens when a thing no longer performs its function? Is it still a thing, or has it become something else? When you rip the cloth off the umbrella, is the umbrella still an umbrella...Is it possible to go on calling this object an umbrella? In general, people do...To me this is a serious error, the source of all our troubles.” Everything speaks in its own way. Ineluctable modality of the visible.
It goes on to say that while the umbrella has changed, the word has not, and therefore the word can no longer express the thing, it is imprecise, false, hiding the thing it is supposed to reveal.
Each tongue that tried would certainly fall short
Because the shallowness of both our speech
And intellect cannot contain so much. – Dante,
The Divine Comedy, Inferno
So then the bathtub in the front lawn that covers the Virgin Mary is no longer a bathtub because it no longer serves its purpose and it is cut in half, resembling a bathtub. The ordinary and mundane is transformed into the sacred. But if a bathtub can be turned into a sacred object, perhaps it could be sacred to begin with. A bathtub is part of the morning ritual, and then becomes a part of the Roman Catholic tradition. A
bricolage. The bathtub is now made sacred by Roman Catholics who construct bathtub Madonna lawn shrines, but it can no longer claim to be a bathtub. To call it such would be misleading and false.
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. – Eliot,
Four Quartets, Burnt Norton
What’s told is often less than the event – Dante,
The Divine Comedy, Inferno
Thucydides expressed his sense of the internal chaos brought upon Greece by the civil wars that arose during the time of the
Peloponnesian War by telling us that words themselves have lost their meaning. But before anything is in the lost and found, it must be paid for. Ever had a conversation with
Humpty Dante? Language is a mysterious thing, confining, liberating. Words mean only and just what I choose them to mean. Who is to be master? Twas
brillig, and the
slithy toves did
gyre and
gimble in the
wabe.
Packtight your portmanteau and forge the uncreated conscience. Poor baby
tuckoo.
Sunday
Why read books? What do we want from books? A girl I know named Alice asked, “What good is a book without pictures?” And as I was reading
Auster, this line answered it for me, “And that’s finally all anyone wants out of a book-to be amused.”
Bahti: The reader is a child who wants to go to the fair.
I don’t crack open a book because I want a new perspective on life, I crack it open to be amused and entertained. A good idea would be to pick high quality amusement, and then the new perspective comes as a bonus.
Another less inspired girl,
Gamgie asked, “Why be trapped in an addiction of fabulous ideas and wonderful life connections? What is the point of understanding of partially understanding the mysteries and ideas shown in the highest texts if you don't have your own experience to connect them to?” I think my reading diary has shown that we need life and literature together. I’m down to drink the
kool-aid.
MondayIt is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. Of course reading
Auster, here I am back at the reality or fiction dilemma. He says, “As opposed to the story writer, I was offering my creations directly to the real world, and therefore it seemed possible to me that they could affect this real world in a real way, that they could eventually become a part of the real itself. No writer could ask for more than that.” Perhaps the real can illuminate the fictitious, and the fictitious can illuminate the real, especially if they are nearly indistinguishable. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
Tuesday
Another day, another book. Looking back over the days and my entries I’
ve done a lot of writing and a lot of reading, but I’
ve lost all of my friends.
I biked up 7
th today to go across campus then to my home behind the Home of the Dinosaurs. Not far along I got a whiff of a distinct aroma. I don’t know what the scent was, but I was overcome with contentment and a sense of an old home associated with my family. There’s no place like home. The cozy feeling slipped away as I kept biking. I stopped. Sniffed the air. Nothing. Two men were standing next to a drift boat. The sun was shining. I decided it was lost and continued on my way home. Mole said, “You don’t understand! It’s home, my old home! I’
ve just come across the smell of it, and it’s close by here, really quite close.” I cannot remember the fragrance at all now. The only thing I can recall is how I felt. Baby, from the coffee shop trio, told me that the sense of smell is the strongest trigger for memories. The trouble is I don’t know the memory.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. – Eliot,
Four Quartets, Burnt Norton
I thought nothing of this until I started reading, The Wind in the Willows later this afternoon. When Mole feels strangely tired, and Rat too feels tired, as if something peculiar had just happened. And the wind playing in the reeds, is like far-away music, soft thin whispering. Then the song died away into reed-talk. Neither Rat nor Mole knew what the words in the song meant, and they slept.
WednesdayYesterday I was walking my dog, Copper to the mail box. My neighbor, with her two little dogs Boone and Crockett, started talking to me from the other side of the chain link fence. We talked of the neighborhood. My home was built on a swamp, the trees were planted by a man named Jim and my neighbor had protested the construction of the very place I lived. I don’t know how wise this woman is, but she reminded me of Badger with her salt and pepper hair, small
squinty eyes, and long fingernails. “People come - they stay for a while, they flourish, they build - and they go. It is their way. But we remain.” My neighbor was here before me, but the muskrat I see swimming in the little stream marked:
DANGER
WATER
was here before my neighbor, and will be here when we and our kind our gone.
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and
faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
- Eliot,
Four Quartets, East
CokerThursday
What does it matter that I’
ve read all these books? What does it matter that I’
ve kept a reading diary documenting my thoughts and connections? My chances of experiencing the divine in my daily life in an ordinary and industrial world are slim to none. Therefore finding the extraordinary in the ordinary is what has to happen. The more connections you make, the more AHA! moments you have, the closer you are to an epiphany. Literature is what opens the gateway to the mysterious mental maneuver, the chess game.
Liss!
Liss! O
Liss! So I can read a long seemingly boring grocery list like:
Milk
Tea
Apples
Juice
Oxtail
Yogurt
Bread
Cookies
Bagels
Kleenex
Paper Towels
And the tea and cookies brings my mind to
Proust and the Cookie. Does this mean I have found an epiphany in an old grocery shopping list? Kleenex reminds me of a white dog I know named Puff.
FridayI’m reading
Ulysses by James Joyce who explores the ordinary, and shows the reader how to find the divine in the secular world.
To be a good reader Nabokov informs us that
The reader should have:
artistic sense
imagination
memory
a dictionary
Armed with this knowledge I embarked on
Ulysses, or maybe
Ulysses embarked on me.
Ulysses starts on an ordinary day with, “Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the
stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” It starts out easy enough, but trust me you need all four elements of being a good reader to survive
Ulysses.
SaturdayI was up late reading
Ulysses when I wanted to call my friend
Ellsie. So instead of a disturbing phone call I
texted her,
U up? “U. p: up on it to take a li ...I’ve started seeing connections that were never intended.
Sunday
I love Bloom, but I pity him. What is the password? Pity. Pity + Beauty = art. Bloom is full of good intentions, then action.
Stephen on the other hand reminds me of Hamlet. While Joyce uses Hamlet to go along with a father theme I noticed, I think there is another reason Hamlet is used. Inaction. Stephen could never save a drowning person, can’t deal with Buck Mulligan and Haines, and also chooses oblivion through consuming a large quantity of alcohol. Agenbite of inwit. Inwit’s agenbite. Misery. Remorse of consciousness. That is the problem with having a lot of potential, people expect you to use it.
As Stephen and Hamlet are paralyzed, so too are Job and Arjuna. Whiney babies. In Beckett’s Molloy of
Three Novels his hen, “had done nothing but sit with her arse in the dust, from morning to night. Like Job, haha.”
You are so vain you think this song is about you?
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers. – Eliot,
Four Quartets, The Dry Salvages
This is all a play, an act, an illusion. The world is maya. Stephen, Hamlet, Arjuna, and Job, be in the world but not of it. God makes it rain in the Forest where there are no people. Atman is Brahman and to go to battle is to follow the sacred duty set out by the divine. Hamlet transcends the notion of the corrupt world and illusion. Stephen is still of the world, and walks off into the night.
I’m going to kill you, but don’t take it personally.
If life is all a play, an act, an illusion, a fiction, a myth or a dream, then where does reality and fiction meet? In
The Tempest. The magician, the man behind the curtain, is pulling the strings, and making it happen. Then there is the revealing, the curtain is drawn and a man and a woman are playing chess. A showing forth takes place, and the audience applause releases the illusion. Who is my audience?
Monday
Today I had to give up a good friend of mine named Laurel. She held me when I was tired. She was slightly broken, but to me she was perfect. Ursett told me I was too attached, and maybe I am. Suffering is caused by attachment. I’m like the guy in The Jerk movie, he must have the lamp, the chair, the remote, et cetera. But attachment and distraction are all part of the human condition.
TuesdayI was biking to school and a group of kids from a nearby elementary school were walking as a class along the trail. I had my headphones in rocking out to Lady Gaga. Some kids were dawdling, some were holding hands, and others were by themselves looking up into the sky. I took my headphones out of my ears and listened. I did this because of a passage from
Ulysses.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirling whistle: goal.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window saying:
- That is God.
That is God. What is God? The shouting and laughing of children. The everyday ordinary sounds heard when biking, walking, or just living in town.
Who finds out about 15 year old girls and God? The artist.
Wednesday
The warm days have started. I looked at my bookshelves this morning and thought about organizing them. But how do you organize books? Some books belong in two or three sections at once. I touch the spines of the books and know that in each one, no matter what they are about, is a minor miracle waiting to take place with every opening of the pages. And every day I live, the possibility is open for minor miracles there too. And by connecting both literature and life, discovering the never ending cross reference of the world, I think an apocalypse, an awakening, an unexpected Epiphany can erupt. The lighting bolt that pilots all things.
I look forward to the rest of life and literature. And if a brick from Howard Hall falls on me tomorrow, my last thought might be completely irrelevant and the last thing I hear would be Lady Gaga singing:
“Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh
Stop telephonin’ me!
Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh
I’m busy!......."
Not really the way I want to go, but I can never be optimally aware because, as Arjuna pleads with Krishna to hide his true terrifying form, one turns at last from glory itself with a sigh of relief.
Inspired by:
A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel
Reading List (in order of appearance)
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki
The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Ulysses by James Joyce
Other Known Resources (in order of appearance)Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Hamlet by Shakespeare
Fragments of Heraclitus
The Labyrinth, movie starring David Bowie
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
The Story of Layla and Majnun by Nizami
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Metamorphoses of Ovid
Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
The Tempest by Shakespeare
Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
LIT 436 Blogs
LIT 494 Blogs
Cult Meetings
Three Novels by Samuel Beckett
Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
When Words Lose Their Meaning by James Boyd White
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The Bhagavad-Gita
The Book of Job in King James Bible
Proust and the Cookie
The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom
Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov
Telephone, song by Lady Gaga
Teaching a Stone to Talk, “Total Eclipse”, by Annie Dillard
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