Wednesday Reading Meme
Oct. 27th, 2021 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
When I got John W. Crowley’s The Mask of Fiction: Essays on W. D. Howells, I was afraid it would either spend a lot of time insisting that the gayish parts in the Howells books were not actually gay, or conversely that the gayish parts prove that Howells must have been gay, but in fact Crowley, bless him, is perfectly comfortable with sexual ambiguity and just goes with it. There are gayish bits and isn’t that interesting! Here are the books in case you want to read them yourself.
There are also a few chapters about the Freudian interpretation of Howells’ work, which is not really my jam, but by that point Crowley had earned my indulgence so I just smiled and nodded. And, distressingly, I found these interpretations less of a reach than Freudian interpretations often are. As Crowley points out, Howells and Freud were near contemporaries (Howells is about twenty years older, but their careers overlapped). There must have just been something in those nineteenth-century waters.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve been going through an enormous stack of old notebooks, which is now… slightly less enormous… but still pretty big. It consists of:
1. Old diaries. There are three of these and I think that I will just store them in the box with my other old diaries, even though those are cute diary books and these are simply in spiral bound notebooks.
2. Old class notes. I recycled the ones I will never use again (various math classes etc.), but there’s a lot of stuff here that could be handy if it were in a more accessible form: for instance, the Civil War notes and the INCREDIBLY detailed notes from the two classes about the 1960s that I TAed will be very useful for Sleeping Beauty. I need to type these up & then I can get rid of the physical copies.
3. Old story snippets. Waffling about what to do with these. I hate to just wantonly get rid of them, but it seems like a waste of time to type them up. You might imagine that if there are snippets about the same two characters stretching over a dozen or so notebooks, something that you might call “a story” would emerge, but this is not in fact the case!
OTOH, some of the Jess & Innis stuff definitely found its way into Honeytrap’s DNA; the details are very different (Jess & Innis was a secondary world fantasy, and in some of the versions Innis was a POW who basically got chucked at Jess’s head after the prison camp lost funding to feed all the prisoners: “Take him, I’m sure you can put him to use somehow!”), but the “our empires are at loggerheads but we have to work together” thing is very much the same.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m contemplating whether to read Crowley’s biography The Black Heart’s Truth: The Early Career of W. D. Howells. Maybe I ought to read Howells’ memoir Years of My Youth first?
When I got John W. Crowley’s The Mask of Fiction: Essays on W. D. Howells, I was afraid it would either spend a lot of time insisting that the gayish parts in the Howells books were not actually gay, or conversely that the gayish parts prove that Howells must have been gay, but in fact Crowley, bless him, is perfectly comfortable with sexual ambiguity and just goes with it. There are gayish bits and isn’t that interesting! Here are the books in case you want to read them yourself.
There are also a few chapters about the Freudian interpretation of Howells’ work, which is not really my jam, but by that point Crowley had earned my indulgence so I just smiled and nodded. And, distressingly, I found these interpretations less of a reach than Freudian interpretations often are. As Crowley points out, Howells and Freud were near contemporaries (Howells is about twenty years older, but their careers overlapped). There must have just been something in those nineteenth-century waters.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve been going through an enormous stack of old notebooks, which is now… slightly less enormous… but still pretty big. It consists of:
1. Old diaries. There are three of these and I think that I will just store them in the box with my other old diaries, even though those are cute diary books and these are simply in spiral bound notebooks.
2. Old class notes. I recycled the ones I will never use again (various math classes etc.), but there’s a lot of stuff here that could be handy if it were in a more accessible form: for instance, the Civil War notes and the INCREDIBLY detailed notes from the two classes about the 1960s that I TAed will be very useful for Sleeping Beauty. I need to type these up & then I can get rid of the physical copies.
3. Old story snippets. Waffling about what to do with these. I hate to just wantonly get rid of them, but it seems like a waste of time to type them up. You might imagine that if there are snippets about the same two characters stretching over a dozen or so notebooks, something that you might call “a story” would emerge, but this is not in fact the case!
OTOH, some of the Jess & Innis stuff definitely found its way into Honeytrap’s DNA; the details are very different (Jess & Innis was a secondary world fantasy, and in some of the versions Innis was a POW who basically got chucked at Jess’s head after the prison camp lost funding to feed all the prisoners: “Take him, I’m sure you can put him to use somehow!”), but the “our empires are at loggerheads but we have to work together” thing is very much the same.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m contemplating whether to read Crowley’s biography The Black Heart’s Truth: The Early Career of W. D. Howells. Maybe I ought to read Howells’ memoir Years of My Youth first?
no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 05:59 am (UTC)Keep the snippets! If there is a local urchin you could hire to scan them in somehow that would be ideal but I understand it is not always possible to find this combination of elements. But they are too good to throw away.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 04:51 pm (UTC)TBH I'm not sure some of them are scannable, because they were written in a purple pen that has simultaneously faded and bled through the paper, and would probably be unreadable in scanned form. (I have learned my lesson and now avoid all purple pens!) The ones in black pen might be manageable... Maybe I should acquire a newsboy cap and pretend to be an urchin myself.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 12:42 pm (UTC)Keep them! Make some future archivist/biographer/grad student's day when they discover the early writings of such a great author :)
no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 04:52 pm (UTC)A second filing cabinet might not be enough to deal with this influx. I may have to look for a third.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 03:12 pm (UTC)SO UNFAIR. I have like three boxes of notes and snippets and clippings and outlines that should have magically turned into a novel years ago!
no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 04:57 pm (UTC)LIES
//has the 60,000 "winning" Nano manuscript from like a decade? ago to prove it, lolsob
no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 05:08 pm (UTC)that is every fic I have ever written
no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 09:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 10:15 pm (UTC)