rocket to nowhere

And if I failed to mention this detail in its proper place, it is because you cannot mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not worth mentioning and those even less so. For if you set out to mention everything you would never be done, and that’s what counts, to be done, to have done.
          —Samuel Beckett, Molloy

• @hudspkl b/c you have no expectations & nothing to lose. Or was that a rhetorical question? in reply to hudspkl #
• @LairdHunt Happy Father's Day. Thanks for the shout-out. in reply to LairdHunt #
• Leaving IA. Will try to read while riding in the car. Left my deck of cards at home. Will flip one later. #reading #
• 6 of diamonds: most of The Blithedale Romance in a car across IA and NE. #reading #
• A little late: 5 of hearts: typing notes, finishing Blithedale (damned mystery set-up!), falling more behind. #reading #
• 6 of clubs: Flaubert, James, and Forster. Still two days behind. No worries. Just keep reading. #
• 4 of hearts: finish Forster, then Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, and Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Seriously, both Ulysses and To the Lighthouse. #
• RT @robcorddry: I wish it had been Michael Jackson that broke the story of TMZ dying. I can almost hear the high-fives. (via @kjcw) #
• I worry that this process will kill my love for reading or at least destroy the ability to let a text wash over me. #reading #
• Ace of Spades! Dos Passos, Faulkner–I'm letting Lukacs drop and going back to Auerbach who got lost along the way somewhere. #
• Sometimes difficult to remember to think about The Novel instead of This novel right here. #
• Auerbach, you beautiful bastard! #

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He worked hard—seven hours a day; his subject was now the influence of something upon somebody—they were walking on and Mrs. Ramsay did not quiet catch the meaning, only the words, here and there . . . dissertation . . . fellowship . . . readership . . . lectureship. She could not follow the ugly academic jargon, that rattled itself off so glibly, but said to herself that she saw now why going to the circus had knocked him off his perch, poor little man, and why he came out, instantly, with all that about his father and mother and brothers and sisters, and she would see to it that they didn’t laugh at him any more; she would tell Prue about it.
          —Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment were contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider.
          —E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

On the hill there was a poor tramp wandering about with his stick, in among the carriages. A mass of rags covered his shoulders, and a squashed beaver-hat, bent down into the shape of a bowl, concealed his face; but, when he took it off, he exposed, instead of eyelids, two yawning bloodstained holes. The flesh was tattered into scarlet strips; and fluid was trickling out, congealing into green crusts that reached down to his nose, with black nostrils that kept sniffing convulsively. Whenever he spoke, he threw back his head with an idiot laugh;—then his blue eyes, rolling continuously, would graze the edges of the open sores, near both temples.

He used to sing a little song as he followed the carriages:

Souvent la chaleur d’un beau jour
   [Maids in the warmth of a summer day,]
Fait rêver fillette à l’amour.
   [Dream of love, and of love always . . . ]

          —Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

[The sharks] viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound.
—Melville, Moby-Dick

• Tired but afraid I'll have trouble sleeping for nervousness before the big read. #
• My reading schedule, not counting built-in spillage days, is 52 days long. The number of weeks in a year. The number of cards in a deck. #
• Just purchased and shuffled a deck of cards for my 52 days of reading. Will turn a card for each day. Today's: Jack of clubs. #reading #
• Not yet sure what I'll do with this playing card information. #reading #
• Ace of Diamonds: Watt-Rise of the Novel; Defoe-Robinson Crusoe; McKeon-Theory of the Novel #
• Watt sez Quixote is myth not novel, but both book and character are more self-aware (1 of Watt's criteria(?)) than Robinson Crusoe. #
• 7 of Diamonds: Frye, Freud, Benjamin; Richardson, Fielding; Auerbach (there's no way) #
• Who doesn't want to cap off a day of intense reading by going to Flatiron Crossing in Broomfield? #
• 2 of clubs: Auerbach, Sterne, Bakhtin (Frye? Freud?) (and I keep forgetting the hash tag) #reading #
• The first yerba mate of the afternoon is steeping . . . #
• 6 of hearts: Hawthorne, Melville, and a 9 hour drive. #
• 6:30 in Iowa is 5:30 in Denver, but it's important to get to the firehouse early for pancakes. #

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It is inherent in the technique of the film as well as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert. . . . Similarly, the newsreel offers everyone the opportunity to rise from passer-by to movie extra. In this way any man might even find himself part of a work of art. . . . Any man today can lay claim to being filmed. This claim can best be elucidated by a comparative look at the historical situation of contemporary literature.

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers—at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for ‘letters to the editor.’ And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship. . . . Literary license is not founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.

—Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935)

First, as for yesterday and today’s titles: My summer reading schedule covers exactly 52 days (not counting days set aside for spillage). That’s the same number of weeks in a year or cards in a deck. Yesterday, on my first day of reading, I bought a deck of cards, shuffled it 13 times, and will now turn one card over every day I read. I’m not sure why and I’m not sure what I’ll do with this playing card information, but there it is. In any case, posts with playing card titles will be about that day’s reading in some way or another.

Today:

Of these mustachios or whiskers, I will not say they were long enough to hang my hat upon them, but they were of a length and shape monstrous enough, and such as, in England, would have passed for frightful. —Defoe, Robinson Crusoe