{"id":117913,"date":"2016-06-15T07:49:09","date_gmt":"2016-06-15T11:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=117913"},"modified":"2016-07-18T10:48:20","modified_gmt":"2016-07-18T14:48:20","slug":"stuff-ive-been-reading-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=117913","title":{"rendered":"Stuff I’ve Been Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been on the move. Out in LA for 6 days, staying first with Alex and Chrisanne, and then checking into the Hotel California with my mother and two sisters. There was no pink champagne on ice, and we were able to check out any time we liked, just FYI. <\/p>\n

\n\"CkrC1ZmUoAEFGQR.jpg-large\"<\/p>\n

\nWe were 4 blocks away from where the asshole with explosives in his car was arrested, so that was unnerving. I’m from New York. I saw a plane fly through the air and crash into a skyscraper. I don’t scare easily. Fuck those people. <\/p>\n

I’m broke so the flights I took out and back were arduous and involved, like, a 3.5 hour layover in Detroit, and stuff like that. I read the entire way. I rarely get time to read anymore. Here are the books I’ve been juggling. <\/p>\n

— Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, by John Lahr. The long-awaited second volume of the biography published by Lyle Leverich 20 years ago. Leverich died before he could finish it, and bequeathed all of his research to John Lahr, who has also been writing about Tennessee Williams for the entirety of his career. Leverich is a better writer than John Lahr (I don’t care for Lahr’s writing, in general), but what is so awesome about this book is the sheer AMOUNT of quotation. It’s almost like the text skips and hops from one quote to the next. It’s beautiful. The story is heart-wrenching, though. As always, what I am left with with Williams is drop-dead admiration at how MUCH he could accomplish against such personal odds, including the vicious critical indifference he experienced from the 1960s on (indifference which is a DISGRACE to our culture.) His late plays are some of his best and most daring work. Time has given Tennessee have the last laugh. He was ahead of everybody else’s curve, and still is, in many ways. I finished this one. It made me cry on the plane. <\/p>\n

— Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, by Robert Kaplan. Kaplan is a favorite author of mine (I’ve written about him extensively), and I have all of his books but he’s so prolific it’s hard to keep up. I read Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military, from Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond<\/a>\"\"<\/i> and this one is sort of the second part of his “investigation” into the US military and how it operates. He’s not an academic. He’s a journalist. He embeds with these men and women, seeing their tasks and talents, talking to them, riding in submarines and on camels, and etc. He doesn’t sit in a study in Boston, writing from afar. Anyway, his stuff is great, and his writing is wonderful. I highly recommend him, in general. An interesting perspective. <\/p>\n

— Shakespeare’s Sonnets<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, edited by Stephen Booth. This is the edition to get. (I wrote about Stephen Booth and this edition here.<\/a>) I read one sonnet a morning, and then read Stephen Booth’s extensive footnotes. Which are unlike any other footnotes I have ever seen in my life. He is not concerned with paraphrasing the sonnets, or what they MEAN. He is interested in each word, and its history, and how a Renaissance\/Elizabethan reader would have understood it. The puns, and layers, and inferences. Meaning is up to the reader. And each sonnet doesn’t have just one meaning. You have to be open to fluidity and complexity. If you are in any way squeamish about the word “cunt,” (and I get it, although I don’t share the squeamish-ness – that doesn’t mean I want the word thrown my way in emails or on the street, as sometimes happens) then Booth’s footnotes (and the sonnets themselves) will cause a tailspin! But Shakespeare “cunt” puns so often that you get immune to hearing the word. It’s a sexual joke. Shakespeare puns “penis” too. It’s everywhere. Sex is everywhere. Nothing has changed. I find it humorous to hear academics try to be gentlemanly or polite about it. Booth doesn’t have that problem. He’s like: “This word has multiple meanings including the obvious, it sounds a lot like ‘cunt.'” Moving on. I’ve done this chronological sonnet-reading before and I find it very meditative. Just one a day.<\/p>\n

— The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May<\/a>\"\"<\/i> (finished last month) and The Familiar, Volume 2: Into the Forest<\/a>\"\"<\/i> (reading now), by Mark Z. Danielewsk. Huge HUGE fan of his work. His House of Leaves<\/a>\"\"<\/i> is the only book that has actually given me nightmares. The Familiar<\/i> is a three-volume multi-narrator story about … I can’t tell yet. SOMETHING IS HAPPENING AND I CAN’T STOP READING. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been on the move. Out in LA for 6 days, staying first with Alex and Chrisanne, and then checking into the Hotel California with my mother and two sisters. There was no pink champagne on ice, and we were … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15,3],"tags":[2094,1101,75,600,1007,76,160,156,2134,190,141,218],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117913"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117913"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117921,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117913\/revisions\/117921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=117913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=117913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}