Journal of a Sabbatical

February 12, 2001

not much

Today's Reading: In Audubon's Labrador by Charles Wendell Townsend, The Cat Who Smelled a Rat by Lillian Jackson Braun

Some further thoughts on those pesky literary lists:

Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing by May Sarton unaccountably appears only on the Feminista list. I once years ago tried to describe what I liked about it to a friend as "it's like when my cat is sitting in a little pool of bright sun and glows bright orange". It's like focusing a beam of light on each little detail of life and noticing its beauty with extra intensity. Surely it's "great" as a novel and not just as a novel written by a woman?

And The Late George Apley by John Marquand doesn't appear on any of the lists. What up with that? If there were a men's equivalent of the Feminista list (the Modern Library list doesn't count as a men's list in this sense because they didn't consciously set out to create a men's list) I'd think The Late George Apley would be somewhere in the middle of the pack. Is anybody going to do a men's list? I'd be fascinated to see a "Men's Studies" professor do such a list just to see what the intersection with the Modern Library list would be.

Some further thoughts on blind monkeys with disposable cameras:

When I was browsing James Elkins' book How to Use Your Eyes at the Brown Bookstore, I quipped to Nancy that since I was giving up photography this book would help me know what to look for in the pictures I get when I loose the blind monkeys with disposable cameras on greater Salisbury. A guy sitting in a nearby armchair browsing some sort of photography book looked up at me gravely as if he thought I was really doing this blind monkeys with disposable cameras thing. He shook his head and went back to browsing his book probably think I was some nuttier than usual art student from RISD.

And more on weird book browsing:

We also browsed at a novel called Gob's Grief, which features Victoria Claflin Woodhull and some of her fictional children in the Civil War and its aftermath. We must tell Ned he has some new cousins hitherto unknown to Claflin family genealogists. They are oddly Ned-like considering they're fictional.

We now return control of your television set...