August 31, 2014 5 Elul 5774 Blog I spent a week looking for Eleanor Cattons massive (830 pages) novel, “The Luminaries” and at last discovering it (Susann discovered it) in a pile of unsorted clean laundry. It is hard to lose so large a hardbound book, so theories flew involving lending it to Idit (for whom we are a dependable source of reading matter), mistakenly moving it to one of the numerous and shifting, like sands in the Sahara, heaps of read or abandoned books, or dropping it somehow into a time-space discontinuum, although such discontinua generally swallow smaller objects. By hiding in the laundry, Cattons book lost its place, and when I finished Shteyngarts memoir, (very well done. It gets much better as it moves along and Shteyngart – the reader can feel this – gets more comfortable with his confessional mode.) I read articles in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and a lot of online poetry and, mostly yesterday, Saramagos novel “Death – with Interruptions.” Had “The Luminaries” not been misplaced, I doubt I should have gotten around to the Saramago. We only have this book because Susann read and strongly recommended his novel “Blindness” (still on the long to-be-read list) and this Saramago is much shorter (228 pages). In deciding to read him at all, I had to balance the Nobel Prize and rave reviews against his loud and blatant anti-Semitism, but there are no Jews or references to Jews in the novel I read. There are also no real people. The closest he comes is death (no upper case D), a woman who falls in love with a cellist she is scheduled to kill. That is a “spoiler” and Im glad. Anyway, I no longer feel like reading so long a novel and have begun another, Siri Hustvedts “The Blazing World: - again a Susann recommendation – and I am confident choosing it because I have read some of her earlier novels. The paragraph above, about a lost book found and some comments its misplacing and being found evoked, is a little over three hundred words long. I remember well the shock on the faces of my ninth grade students – intelligent, well grounded children eager to succeed, a few even eager to learn – when I told them to write for next days homework a two hundred word essay on anything they found interesting. I, experienced, can write over two hundred words on the experience of assigning a two hundred word paper and demonstrating the ease of writing such a paper and I have just done so. “But Mr. Codish,” I hear from the third row, from a pretty fourteen year old girl in a blue shirt, “my mother sorts all the clean laundry right away,” and after checking her face quickly for signs of irony (irony has been detected at younger ages than historically common) and finding none, inwardly express the hope that she grows up and discovers some non-intellect demanding talent. And I have writte five hundred words – a tenth grade assignment – and said very little or, as my students too often wrote, “very, very little,” squeezing in that extra word. It is 9:30. I blabber here in bed and Susann, blessedly beside me, translates for shekels. I am forbidden to interrupt her, and dont, sipping the coffee she brought me at nine. I have taken many pain pills and they work, mostly, and if they befuddle my mind, this writing serves as counter-drug. I read news feeds and see that the cease fire holds and nattering continues except for those places far from here where nations kill each others citizens and there is absolutely nothing at all my knowledge of this in any way affects. Students: There are ten words in this paragraph that are “padding.” Two points extra credit for finding them. Shavua Tov
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 07:04:33 +0000
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