A while ago I did a list of works I’d include on a literary tour of the Art Institute. Well, I know I missed a bunch, but there’s one major omission I noticed this weekend – a great painting of Elaine, from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. There are a lot of different variations on this theme, but few better than the one at AIC. Didn’t get the name of the artist, unfortunately. It’s downstairs in the American section.

If you get there before September 25, you can also see Velasquez’s Aesop, on temporary loan from the Prado. That’s for all those who say my literary tastes are too conservative.

This has nothing to do with Chicago: Reading Yoko Tawada tonight, I started thinking of who I would compare her to. Jean-Phillippe Toussaint came to mind. I decided to go to Amazon to see what people were people were saying about Toussaint, who I haven’t read for a while. I discovered that Linda Coverdale has translated his upcoming novel. Which reminded me that Coverdale translated my favorite book by Patrick Chamoiseau, School Days. (Not to be confused with R. K. Narayan’s wonderful My Days.) I thought about how much I liked School Days, right down to the physical package itself — a beautiful little book. Which was published by the same press that published The Robber by one of my favorite writers, Robert Walser, which I have in paperback but wished I had bought the cool red hardcover when I saw it in the Beverly Hills Library back in 2000. Which was translated by Susan Bernofsky, who translated the Yoko Tawada novel I was reading tonight.

Been meaning to read his short story collection, Things That Fall from the Sky. Maybe I’ll go see him read at Barbara’s this week (see entry in the Reader for Wednesday the 23th). Same night Eggers reads at SAIC, and Zadie Smith reads at Harold Wash.

It’s great that the English Dept at Northwestern has their fall Literary Studies Calendar published already. Some neat events, including a weeklong event devoted to French feminist critic Helene Cixous. This week I visited the web sites for the English Departments at other local schools, and no one else appears to be contemplating the fall yet.

Chicago-native (Oak Park, actually) novelist Carol Shields died Wednesday night. Here are some of the articles marking her passing:

Carol Shields (Daily Telegraph)
Your tributes to author Carol Shields (BBC Online)
Carol’s love for her Larry (Toronto Star)
Writer had fierce convictions (Globe and Mail)
Orange winner dies, still engrossed in her books, at 68 (Guardian)
Literary world mourns passing of a giant (Montreal Gazette)
Carol Shields, Pulitzer-Prize Winning Novelist, Dies at 68 (New York Times)

I saw Shields read in Chicago in 1995, when she was promoting The Stone Diaries, and she was as wonderful to hear as she was to read. I don’t think many people would dispute her standing as one of the five or ten most significant novelists of the past decade.

Visited a used bookstore tonight and bought a copy of Walter Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson. Reading the Oxford chapter I came across one of my favorite Johnson quotes, about his fellow students at Oxford:

They respected me for my literature; and yet it was not great but by comparison. It is amazing how little literature there is in the world.

Reading last week’s Times Literary Supplement, I had to marvel at the list of contributors. Of course there are familiar names — Brenda Maddox, Eugen Weber, Andrew Porter, etc. — but what’s remarkable is the list of folks I’m reading for the first time. And it occurs to me the contributors to the TLS are like the seemingly inexhaustible supply of character actors you see in films and television shows in the UK. They appear from nowhere, command the screen for their five or fifty minutes, then disappear until they’re needed again.

Another publication once observed that the TLS “specializes in outrages.” And indeed, there is usually some amusing tiff in progress on the letters page.

I’ve been reading the TLS weekly for 12 years, and somewhat less regularly for 10 years before that. The Chicago-Main Newsstand in Evanston always has a plentiful supply.

Over the Fourth of July I reread The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The most recent Norton Critical Edition (1998) has some great essays in the back, among them Jane Smiley’s piece from Harper’s challenging HF as a great novel.

If you don’t expect to live in the Midwest for the rest of your life — hell, even if you do — make sure you plan a trip to Hannibal.

Despite being geographically disadvantaged insofar as following the Chicago literary scene is concerned, I’ve decided to give this another whirl, mostly because I have nowhere else to post my literary yammerings. We’ll see how long it lasts.

Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones was born and bred in the Potteries, and still finds the Midlands the most congenial area of England. After leaving school he was sent as assistant to the postmistress (who also kept the forge) at a town about eight miles away, and was for some time employed to carry the letters in a locked leather bag to the big house nearby. So began his long connection with the Post Office. To pay for his art education, he signed a professional contract with Leeds Rugby League club in 1972 and played in the ‘A’ team for the next four seasons. His verse play The Desert and the Mirror was produced at this time. Apart from his work as a professional footballer, he has been a farm laborer, an erector of showground tents, and a bus conductor.

If you’re interested in his namesake, you’ll find him here.