Greatness

The editors of This Recording recently took it upon themselves to rank the one hundred greatest writers (ever). I know that these lists, by their very nature, are highly subjective and informed by the compilers respective biases (nationality/ethnicity/language(s) spoken and read/gender/sexual preference/socio-economic background/etc.). So while it was no mean feat, and their chutzpah (hubris?) is commendable (and I'm a little tickled that Byron placed so highly - 25 - although even I think it's ridiculous) , their inclusion of some questionably great writers has to be challenged (but it should also be said that their list certainly made me think about what makes a writer, or a work of literature, great, and that I waited with bated breath to read each installment and to see if, and where, my favourite writers made the cut). Robert A. Heinlein? Mary Shelley? Henry Miller? Lorene Niedecker? These are some of the greatest writers to have lived? I can easily think of dozens of writers I'd have opted for before any of these. And of the hundred writers, seventy-two wrote in English, fifty-five are Twentieth-Century and thirty-nine are American (no Canadians, of course, unless Saul Bellow or Malcolm Lowry are guilty by association). Which is simply absurd. Which is why I'm posting my own list (I suppose I'm as defenceless as anyone against hubris or self-indulgence). Not exactly of the one hundred greatest writers (because how can anyone decide what and who is great - apart from Shakespeare, of course, who, by the way, came in third on This Recording's list, so, clearly, it's complete nonsense), it's a list of my favourite (i.e. what I've read) novels, poets, dramatists, non-fiction works, short fiction collections and works of speculative fiction (in no particular order). But I'll preface it with a dozen (thirteen, actually) writers I think are nonpareil, and didn't make the cut at This Recording. 

John Crowley

Robertson Davies

Jane Austen 

Lao Tzu

Edith Wharton

A.R. Ammons

C.P. Cavafy

Yehuda Amichai 

Pablo Neruda

Robert Browning

José Saramago

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Anne Carson

Fiction

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The Deptford Trilogy - Robertson Davies

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Light Years - James Salter

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Properties of Light - Rebecca Goldstein

Quarantine - Jim Crace

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

Justine/Balthazar - Lawrence Durrell

Alice's Adventure in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll

The Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake

Little, Big - John Crowley

Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne

Cancer Ward - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

The Passion - Jeanette Winterson

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

Emma - Jane Austen

The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins

The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford

Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

V. - Thomas Pynchon

Nostromo - Joseph Conrad

Ægypt sequence - John Crowley

The Conversations at Curlow Creek - David Malouf

Written on the Body - Jeanette Winterson

The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje

Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon

Still Life with Woodpecker - Tom Robbins

Put Out More Flags - Evelyn Waugh

Scoop -Evelyn Waugh

Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh

Persuasion - Jane Austen

The Brief History of the Dead - Kevin Brockmeier

A Scientific Romance - Ronald Wright

The Translator - John Crowley

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino

Narcissus and Goldmund - Hermann Hesse

Notes from the Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal

Thousand Cranes - Yasunari Kawabata

Poets

Anne Carson

Charles Wright

Rita Dove

Seamus Heaney

Anthony Hecht

J.D. McClatchy

Anne Michaels

e.e. cummings

John Donne

Edward Thomas

Mark Strand

Wallace Stevens

A.R. Ammons

Andrew Marvell

John Keats

Yehuda Amichai

Pablo Neruda

Emily Brontë

Eugenio Montale

Yves Bonnefoy

Pedro Salinas

W.B. Yeats

Catullus

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Walt Whitman

C.P. Cavafy

Ezra Pound

Octavio Paz

Eugénio de Andrade

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Robert Browning

Elizabeth Bishop

Alexander Pope

Lord Byron

Lars Gustafsson

Robert Herrick

W.S. Merwin

Derek Walcott

Cesare Pavese

Galway Kinnell

George Seferis

Rafael Alberti

Czeslaw Milosz

Robert Penn Warren

Fernando Pessoa

Louise Bogan

Charles Baudelaire

Joseph Brodsky

Vicente Aleixandre

Jean Follain

Drama

King Lear - William Shakespeare

Long Day's Journey into Night - Eugene O'Neill

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Othello- William Shakespeare

Angels in America - Tony Kushner

Iphegeneia at Aulis - Euripides

Antigone - Jean Anouilh

The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde

She Stoops to Conquer - Oliver Goldsmith

The Recruiting Officer - George Farquhar

The Beaux' Stratagem - George Farquhar

Tartuffe/The Misanthrope - Molière

Ondine/The Madwoman of Chaillot - Jean Giraudoux

Uncle Vanya - Anton Chekhov

Galileo - Bertolt Brecht

Non-Fiction

Rubicon - Tom Holland

Melodies Unheard - Anthony Hecht

The Lives of a Cell - Lewis Thomas

The Island of the Colorblind - Oliver Sacks

Religio Medici/Hydriotaphia - Sir Thomas Browne

Patrimony - Philip Roth

The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics - Bernard Knox

The Gutenberg Elegies - Sven Birkerts

The Mirror of Myth - Jasper Griffin

What Am I Doing Here - Bruce Chatwin

Speculative Fiction

Novelties and Souvenirs - John Crowley

The Earthsea Trilogy - Ursula K. Le Guin

Map of Desires - M. Rickert

Shadow of Ashland - Terence M. Green

Tigana - Guy Gavriel Kay

On Wings of Song - Thomas M. Disch

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin

Dragonsinger/Dragonsong - Anne McCaffrey

Davy - Edgar Pangborn

The Lions of Al-Rassan - Guy Gavriel Kay

Short Fiction

Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You - Alice Munro

A Fanatic Heart - Edna O'Brien

Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges

Collected Stories - Katherine Mansfield

The Stories - John Cheever

'My Year in Lists' Los Campesinos!

Hate Kills

I learned this yesterday in The New Yorker. One of the results of the anti-Semitic furore during the Dreyfus affair was, in 1943, after her arrest by the Gestapo, Madeleine, granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus, being deported by Vichy France (rife with anti-Dreyfusards) and ending her life at Auschwitz. It's awful how words are simply useless.

'Madeleine' Saint Etienne

Fitzie!

I just learned (thank you, Garrison) that today is F. Scott Fitzgerald's birthday. I think it must be a sign that  I should re-read The Great Gatsby, don't you ? Plus he's just so bloody tragic, and I've been feeling a trifle melancholy recently, so bring on the sadness, Fitzie. 

'We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed' Los Campesinos!

Uncensored

So Banned Books Week begins tomorrow. It celebrates the importance of the First Amendment and the freedom (and right) to choose what one wishes to read. It's quite surprising which books have been challenged or banned and on what grounds. There are the usual suspects, of course, such as Twain's Huckleberry Finn (inappropriate racial slurs), The Catcher in the Rye (because it's "a filthy, filthy book"), and The Satanic Verses (blasphemy!), the Harry Potter novels (Satanism and anti-family sentiments - really?) and Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy (anti-religious, political stance). But also the Lord of the Rings (burned in New Mexico as satanic), Song of Solomon (apparently it's "filth", "trash" and "repulsive"), As I Lay Dying (questions the existence of God - also contains a passage about masturbation), and The Grapes of Wrath (the names of God and Jesus are used "in a vain and profane manner"). Mostly it appears to be issues of sex (and homosexuality), inappropriate language, and the horrors and contagion of irreligious or "humanist" thinking (with a minority upset by the use of racial slurs). 

To show my solidarity with these and other writers, I'm reading a book that I own and that has suffered from repeated attempts to silence it's voice. Not sure which, though. It's between Nineteen Eighty-Four ("pro-communist"), The Satanic Verses ("blasphemous to the prophet Mohammed" and Islam and the Koran, too, of course), Brave New World ("orgies, self-flogging, suicide" with characters who show "contempt for religion, marriage and the family", and it makes promiscuous sex "look like fun"), and The Great Gatsby ("language and sexual references"). I considered The Catcher in the Rye but I've read it twice and I really prefer Salinger's stories. I'll probably pick one of the shorter works because I'm currently reading Crowley's Ægypt tetralogy, plus I just began Don Quixote (suffered water damage at some point), not to mention books borrowed from the library for research. In fact, I think it'll have to be Brave New World. Any book that can make promiscuity fun deserves a repeated reading. And I encourage everyone to read one of the challenged books from the American Library Association's list (even the Gossip Girl books have the right to be read and to an audience, I suppose). 

'Read & Re-Read' I Am Robot and Proud

Perfect Symmetry

Gorgeous new shimmery pop from Welsh indie kids Los Campesinos! 

'The Sea Is a Good Place to Think of the Future' Los Campesinos!

Bounty

Tomorrow I begin harvesting Chinese cabbages. They're a variety of Monument cabbage - not the one I thought I'd planted (apparently this a common problem, even though the seed packet described the variety I wanted), but it'll still make gallons of kimchee. So I'm preparing the kitchen and turning it into my kimchee factory for the next two days. We may be forced to eat pizza and ice cream until we're able to cook again, but I'm pretty certain Lesha will manage to bear it somehow (she's awfully resilient). So here are some photos of the garden - beginning several weeks ago, the most recent from last week (and the cabbages are even larger now).

'Cook It Up (Madlib Remix)' Aesop Rock

It's All Too Much

Our neighbourhood in North Portland (University Park) is a delight to the eyes and nose. It's simply bursting with indescribably beautiful flora: trees (majestic, warty, delicate and fruit-bearing - our neighbours have Italian plums which shade our yard and we've benefited thereby with so much fruit), shrubs/bushes, grasses, vegetables (tomatoes and pumpkins everywhere - and, yes, I know they're actually fruits) and, of course, flowers - especially sunflowers. But, since the summer is rapidly ending, the sunflowers are suffering from advanced macrocephaly. They remind me of triffids, in fact (Lesha agrees that they're quite creepy - with their enormous expressionless faces). Still, I wish I could bear their burden for them. 

'Sunflower' Low

Art Attack

Damien Hirst is a humourless wanker of the first order. And Pharmacy is an iconic work of art? I'm mystified, truly.

'Art Attack' The Maynards

Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag

I realized after posting the Gorey link that today is my (other) nephew's birthday, and in light of this my sister might assume that Gorey's work somehow indicated my feelings (conscious or otherwise) for him (or children as a whole). Which is completely untrue. I like kids, really I do (mostly) - there are many I even love. I merely stumbled into the Gorey website and decided I had to link to it. My nephew is probably the sweetest boy I know, and the funniest (ask him to tell you a joke, particularly a knock-knock joke). And what I said for his older brother's birthday is true of him as well; I don't see him often enough (it feels worse, in fact, because I moved to Massachusetts five months before his birth, and so have seen him even less frequently than his brother - and I can't believe I've been an expat for four years). Anyway, Happy Birthday from your west coast Aunt and Uncle, and I'll work on making a Gorey enthusiast of you.

Goreyness

I'm posting this link for some friends who aren't exactly thrilled that their friends and families are busily reproducing, and are thus feeling increasingly outnumbered as representatives of a happily childless state.  And I suppose for anyone else who has an unequivocal loathing for children, or simply loves Edward Gorey's work (or macabre art) as much as I do. 

'Cool Kids of Death' Saint Etienne